Galaxy Magazine (February 1958)

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SCIENCE FICTION

FEBRUARY 1958

35<

BREAD
OVERHEAD!

a

FRITZ
LEIBER

GRAVEYARD
OF DREAMS

H. BEAM
PIPER

THE RULE
OF THE DOOR

LLOYD
BIGGLE, JR.

A CENTURY OF
NEW ANIMALS

WILLY

LEY

mf and Other Stories

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REPEAT PERFORMANCE

WfRITES Mrs. Owen Libby,
** Chicago: "Years ago, you had
an editorial on toys. My dad
showed it to me so I'd know what
to expect with my baby son. I
thought it was hilarious! But now
that the child — well, it's no laugh-
ing matter, let me tell you. A
lot of new parents badly need that
editorial for perspective. Why not
run it again for the poor things?"

Gladly, Mrs. Libby.

Never have there been so many
toys, play costumes and amuse-
ments for children. It's an alarm-
ing situation. The lessons of his-
tory should help, but they don't.
No generation has yet known how
to cope with the problem.

But we can try. Let's (as) ra-
tionally (as possible) scrounge
around in the past in order to
understand the present and antici-
pate the headaches our kids will
have with their own kids.

No matter how far back we go,
the pattern remains identical:

Parents invariably give their
children more toys and games than
they had when they were young-
sters. The children then have (at
least it seems so to parents) every-
thing to play with and nothing to
play. The plaintive "What should

I do now?" brings forth the out-
raged "Why, when I was your

M

age-

What comes after that forms
an oral record of the human race:

didn't have wooden

u

we

u

wheels to play with, just fire."

-I wasn't allowed to have any
shrunken heads until I was old
enough to go out and hunt for
them."

"—I wouldn't even dare ask for
a slave of my own."

"—we didn't have bows—"

u

It

-arquebuses—"
-ducking stools—"
-sta gecoaches— "

"—railroad trains—"

"—airplanes—"

And now it's all the parapher-
nalia in miniature of the Old West,
crime, war, Atomic Age, space.

Very few adults have ever been
able to resist delivering the
why-when-I-was-your-age lecture.
Having done my own share, I won-
der what drives us to it. Exaspera-
tion, of course, but mostly envy
camouflaged by recollections of
deprivation bravely borne.

The deprivation is obviously in
the present, since one does not feel
deprived of something that doesn't
(Continued on page 6)

4

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

FEBRUARY, 1958

Galaxy

SCIENCE FICTION

VOL. 15, NO. 4

ALL ORIGINAL STORIES • NO REPRINTS!

CONTENTS

NOVELETS

THE RULE OF THE DOOR by Lloyd Biggie, Jr. 8

BREAD OVERHEAD by Fritz Leiber 74

GRAVEYARD OF DREAMS by H. Beam Piper 122

SHORT STORIES

THE BIG BOUNCE by Walter S. Tevis 37

THE REPAIRMAN by Harry Harrison 60

THE BLUE TOWER by Evelyn E. Smith 90

TRADERS RISK by Roger Dee 108

t

SCIENCE DEPARTMENT

FOR YOUR INFORMATION by Willy Ley 47

A Century of New Animals

FEATURES

EDITOR'S PAGE by H. L. Gold A

FORECAST 73

GALAXY'S FIVE STAR SHELF by Floyd C. Gale 104

Cover by PEDERSON Showing TRAFFIC JAM ON RHEA

ROBERT M. GUINN, Publisher H. L GOLD, Editor

WILLY LEY, Science Editor W. I. VAN DER POEL, Art Director

JOAN J. De MARIO, Production Manager SONDRA GRESEN, Asst. to the Editor

GALAXY Science Fiction is published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices:
421 Hudson Street, New York 14, N. Y. 35c per copy. Subscription: (12 copies) $3.50 per
year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions.
Elsewhere $4.50. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright,
New York 1957, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, includ-
ing translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped
envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in
this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental.

Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off.

(Continued from page 4)
yet exist. We had our soapbox
cars and other makeshift toys, in-
cluding discarded eggbeaters and
such from the kitchen, and we
never suspected or missed the daz-
zlesome gadgets of today. Even
if we had, though, we'd have kept
it to ourselves; we'd only have
been inviting still more tiresome
reminders of how much harder
our elders' childhoods were than
ours.

Envy seems a mean emotion
for an adult to have, but it
shouldn't need an apology. Older
generations did have less in their
youth and, contrasting it with the
next generation's engorgement,
they couldn't possibly see how a
child could own so many things
and not know what to play with.

Naturally, we've outgrown the
desire for toys, but here is the
blunt truth — we wish we'd had
them as children. That envy is
very visible to me in the case of
science fiction. I recall digging dog-
gedly for it along the bookshelves
of public libraries; there was hard-
ly any and that bit hidden well
among general titles. Instead of
having to hunt, children now have
to dodge.

What with toys, books, maga-
zines, comics, radio, TV, movies
and princely allowances, it does
seem as if we have more to envy
than any previous generation.

But what will our kids face?

The thought that they'll tell their
youngsters how little they had to
play with may seem preposterous,
but is it?

Toys are an excellent index to
a civilization; they're non-func-
tioning replicas of devices in com-
mon use— as a rule. The excep-
tion, of course, is the element of
fantasy in play and playthings. If
an alien race tried to analyze our
civilization via toys and books, it
would have to conclude that we
are gunmen and have space
travel.

As technology advances and the
number of gadgets increases, so
must playthings become more nu-
merous and complex. It would be
absurd to expect one without the
other.

What will our grandchildren
play with? To know that, you'd
have to be able to outguess prog-
ress. But you may be sure that
toys will at the very least keep
abreast of science.

Now add the certainty that we'll
reach other planets within a single
generation. Lord knows what we'll
find there in the way of artifacts,
pets and plants. But whatever we
find, the kids of that day will have
either as imports or imitations.

I feel sorry in advance for their

parents, who'll yelp in vexation,

"A whole solar menagerie and you

don't know what to play with?

Why, when I was your age-

— H. L. <;ou>

V

6

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

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If nobody up there

liked the barbaric natives

of this backward little planet . . .

TH

UL

why couldn't Skarn

come to prey
and at least stay to scoff?

PROFESSOR Skarn Sku-
karn twisted abruptly on
the soft expanse of his bed
and sat up. A glance at the pink-
tinted indicator told him that the
Time of Sleep was no more than
half expired. He stretched himself,
yawned and rubbed his eyes.

"Strange," he murmured. "Per-
haps it was that sliff* I had for din-

ner.

He immediately rejected this
idea as an assumption unworthy of
a distinguished psychologist and
padded softly into his laboratory.
His lecture notes lay stacked neatly
on his desk. He thumbed through
the metallic sheets, mildly surprised
that he felt no trace of fatigue. His
mind was alert; his ideas flowed
with sparkling clarity. He stood for
a moment, looking thoughtfully at
his notes, and then he slipped into
his flowing professorial robes and
mounted the lectern which stood in
all its imposing grandeur in one

Illustrated by WOOD

■ "-■

8

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

TH

By LLOYD BIGGIE, JR

THE RULE OF THE DOOR

9

corner of the laboratory. He pressed
a button and waited.

Throughout the length and
breadth of the great university city
of Kuln, he knew, oaths and screams
of dismay would be curdling the
air as hundreds of students were
tumbled from their beds by their
tingling wrist bands. They would
scramble for their viewers, asking
themselves, 'What's the old fool
up to now?"

The thought pleased him. He
was not cruel like some of his col-
leagues, who took fiendish delight
in tormenting their students during
the Time of Sleep. Never in his
long academic career had he im-
posed upon his students. But it
might be an interesting psychologi-
cal experiment, he told himself, to
see how much knowledge a sleep-
fogged mind could absorb. He
would deliver one of his more diffi-
cult lectures and follow it imme-
diately with an examination. If the
results were interesting enough, he
would make some comparative ex-
periments and perhaps collect
enough data for a book.

He waited the minimum time
which custom allowed him, and be-
gan. "Lecture nine hundred seventy-
two. The effect of radiation im-
pulses on motor pathways of the
subconscious."

He hesitated. His own wrist band
tingled sharply, almost painfully.
With a sudden rush of panic, he
understood what it was that had

awakened him. He bounded away,
scrambled back to the lectern to
announce, "To be continued,"
pressed the cancellation button and
hurried off to his own viewer.

The face that stared out at him
was drawn and haggard. It was the
Prime Minister, and Skarn could
easily guess who it was that had
disturbed his sleep. The Prime Min-
ister scowled and said enviously,
"You are looking well, Skarn."

"Likewise," Skarn said politely.

1 am not looking well. I am

looking miserable. I'm tired."

"Naturally," Skarn agreed.
"An Imperial Assignment. You

will begin immediately."

^JKARN clucked his tongue joy-
^ fully. Such an honor did not
come more than two or three times
in the entire span of living. "I shall
serve eagerly," he said. "May I in-
quire ..."

"You may," said the Prime Min-
ister. "A patrol ship has discovered
another inhabited planet. His Im-
perial Majesty desires a specimen
of the dominant life-form for the
Royal Collection."

Skarn stirred uneasily and a blu-
ish flush of irritation tinged the
smooth white flesh of his face. "I
am no pickler of lizards," he

growled.

"That you are not," the Prime
Minister acknowledged.

"May I inquire . . ."

"You may. The dominant life-

10

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

form on the planet is intelligent."

"I still fail to comprehend why a
psychologist ..."

"The Rule of the Door applies."
Skarn scratched his bald head
thoughtfully and hoped he was not
making a fool of himself. "That
Rule is unfamiliar to me," he ad-
mitted. "May I inquire . . ."

"You may. The Rule of the Door
was propounded by the Great Kom
when an Imperial Ancestor of His
Imperial Majesty desired a speci-
men of an intelligent life-form."

Skarn bowed deeply at the men-
tion of the venerable psychologist
of psychologists. "It is no doubt an

l

excellent Rule."

"It has been canonized, along
with the other magnificent Rules
propounded by the Great Kom.
However, this being only the sec-
ond time in countless glims that an
Imperial Majesty has requested an
intelligent specimen, the Rule has
not been much used."

"Naturally," Skarn said.

"In fact, the Rule is no longer in-
cluded in the Canon of Rules. Were
it not for the superb memory of
His Imperial Majesty's Prime Min-
ister, the Rule would not have been
followed at this crisis."

"You are to be congratulated."

"His Imperial Majesty has al-
ready done so."

Skarn waited expectantly, and
when the Prime Minister volun-
teered no more information, he be-
gan, "May I inquire . . ."

"You may. The content of the
Rule has been lost."

"In my most respectful opinion,
the Rule can then be followed only
with extreme difficulty."

"His Imperial Majesty does not
minimize the difficulty. It was this
problem that caused him to sum-
mon such a distinguished psycholo-
gist as yourself. At my suggestion,
of course. Your task is to rediscover

*

the content of the Rule of the Door,
to follow it scrupulously, and to
obtain for His Imperial Majesty the
desired specimen."

Skarn bowed. "I shall direct all
of my humble talent to the task."

"Naturally," the Prime Minister
said. "You will, of course, be granted
an unlimited expense account."

"Naturally. I shall also require

unlimited time."

"Naturally."

"I shall also," Skarn said, licking
his lips in anticipation, "require
Imperial permission to search the
Sacred Archives."

"Naturally. I shall expect your
presence at the Imperial Palace
immediately."

The viewer darkened. Skarn
manipulated the dials, saw the blue
acceptance light flash, and stepped
through to the Imperial Palace.

T\ URING three Times of Sleep,
"■-^ Skarn prowled the Sacred
Archives. He sifted rapidly through
pile after pile of metallic sheets.
He found the lost Theorems of

THE RULE OF THE DOOR

11

/

Wukim. He came upon the legen-
dary Speculations of Kakang. And
finally, in a damp corner, he dis-
covered a stack of sheets as tall as
himself which were the notebooks
of the Great Kom.

Duty and curiosity struggled
briefly in his mind, until he effected
a deft psychological compromise.
He read through the notebooks with
reverent care, but only until he
found the Rule of the Door. No fur-
ther. He carried two of the sheets
to have impressions made, sadly
returned the originals to the Sacred
Archives, and sought out the Prime
Minister.

"I have found the content of the
Rule of the Door," he announced.

"Excellent. Your name shall ap-
pear high on the next achievement
citations. What is the content?"

Skarn bowed. "I do not entirely
understand it, but this much is ap-
parent: the Rule of the Door con-
sists of — a Door. Here. I have im-
pressions of the notes of the Great
Kom."

The Prime Minister squinted at
the ancient script. "It is a fitting
tribute to the logic of the Great
Kom that the Rule of the Door
should consist of a Door. You can
read this?"

"Much of it is clear to me," Skarn
admitted cautiously.

"I see. And the diagram. Now
this would be an ancient model of
a matter transmitter."

"Naturally. And this, you see, is

the Door. The desired specimen
steps through the Door and is im-
mediately transmitted — perhaps to
a self-sealing specimen bottle."

"The Door appears to be strange-
ly complicated."

"Naturally. It involves, you see,
a thought-wave analyzer and a sub-
consciousness prober. This would
be an ancient model of a personality
computer. The other instruments
are strange to me. But here — this
would be the central data computer,
which makes the final decision."

"Amazing."

"In his inestimable wisdom, the
Great Kom realized that the disrup-
tion of the life process of an intelli-
gent being was not a project to be
undertaken impulsively. He formu-
lated a series of maxims, you see.
* Spare the humble one, for his na-
ture is sublime. Spare the wise one,
for his nature is rare. Spare the
one who loves others more than
himself, for love is the ultimate
meaning of life. Spare the head of a
family, for his loss would injure
many. Spare the weak one, for his
weakness renders him harmless.
Spare the generous one, for his acts
merit kindness/ There is much
more. Some of it I do not under-

■

stand."

"The Rule of the Door must be
extremely difficult to apply," the
Prime Minister mused.

"Praise be to the Great Kom, we
do not have to apply the Rule. We
have only to build the Door, and

12

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

the Door will select a proper speci-
men for His Imperial Majesty."

The Prime Minister clapped his
hands. "Excellent! You will proceed
at once to this planet and build the
Door."

THHE citizens of Centertown, In-
■*- diana, were agog with excite-
ment. A veritable mansion was
being erected on the outskirts of
their fair community. The owner
was, it was said, a retired Texas oil
millionaire. Or a maharaja who had
escaped from his irate subjects with
a fortune and a few paltry dozen of
his wives and was settling in In-
diana. Or a wealthy manufacturer
who was going to develop their
town into a sprawling metropolis.

Whoever he was, he was in a
hurry. Centertown was sorely taxed
to supply the necessary labor force.
Men were imported from Terre
Haute, and a Terre Haute contrac-
tor put in a winding asphalt drive
through the trees to the top of the
wooded hill where the house was
taking shape. On Sunday after-
noons, the population turned out
en masse to inspect and comment
on the week's progress.

As the mansion neared comple-
tion, the general reaction was one of
disappointment. It was large but
not spectacular. Its architecture was
conservative. Several of Center-
town's moderately wealthy boasted
more elaborate dwellings.

But the inside — ah, there was

something to talk about! The good
citizens of Centertown hung eagerly
on the words of the carpenters who
described it. There was no base-
ment, and except for a lavatory and
a small utilities room, most of the
first floor was a vast living room.
And the owner had a positive mania
for closets and doors.

Along one entire wall of that spa-
cious living room were closets, large,
windowless closets. The doors were
structural monostrosities, fully two
feet thick, which functioned strange-
ly and were hung with an odd type
of hinge no one had ever heard of.
And the doors opened inward. Who
ever heard of a closet with a door
that opened inward? There were
eleven of these closets, and the cen-
ter closet was left unfinished and
doorless.

Clearly, this new resident of Cen-
tertown was a most peculiar person.
If the workmen were to be believed,
he even looked peculiar. And the
painters, returning from putting the
finishing touches on the living room,
added another element of mystery.
Overnight, a door had been placed
on the central closet. A locked door.

SKARN SKUKARN, Jonathan
Skarn to the people of Center-
town, took up his residence in the
new house on a crisp fall day and
led a newly arrived, shivering as-
sistant on a tour of inspection. Skarn
was less than pleased with his as-
sistant. The squat, ill-tempered

THE RULE OF THE DOOR

13

Dork Diffack was grumpy, insulting
and generally obnoxious. He was
also treacherous. Skarn knew that
Dork would be immensely pleased
if the Assignment ended in failure,
since the disgrace would be Skarn's.

He also knew that he could not
fail, praise be to the Great Kom.

Dork snorted disdainfully and
turned back toward the house.
"Abominable climate," he growled.
"And these barbarians — I must ad-
mit they have intelligence, since
they have a civilization of sorts, but
it can't be much intelligence."

"Nevertheless," Skarn said, "they
are intelligent, so the Rule of the
Door must apply."

"Intolerable nonsense. Why go to
all this bother and expense to col-
lect a specimen? Why not just pack
one off and have done with it?
There are enough of the creatures
running around here." Dork glanced
back toward the highway, where
several cars were parked, their oc-
cupants staring at the house. "The
patrol captain could have done it,"
he went on. "It's a pretty mess when
men of our distinction have to go
chasing around the Galaxy just to
satisfy old Kegor's whims about his
Biological Museum."

"His Imperial Majesty," Skarn
said sternly, "does not have whims."

Dork, being a native of the out-
lying planet of Huzz, was given to
displaying a lack of respect for His
Imperial Majesty. He also dis-
played a lack of respect for Skarn

— motivated, of course, by jealousy
over the fact that Skarn's professor-
ship at the Royal University was
vastly superior to the one Dork held
on Huzz. Dork was competent
enough, though, in his way, and
praise be to the Great Kom, the
Assignment shouldn't take long.

"I never heard of this Rule of
the Door on Huzz," Dork said.

"It seems to be unknown to the
outlying planets," Skarn replied.
"But then there had been no rea-
son for its use for so long that it
was almost forgotten even on the
Mother Planet. It seems to have
been invoked only once, and that
during the Great Kom's lifetime."

r | 1 HEY entered the house and
-*• crossed the expanse of living
room. Dork gave the Door a disre-
spectful kick. "Built precisely to the
Great Kom's specifications, I sup-
pose."

"Precisely," Skarn said.

"Well, you said the servants will
be here tomorrow. Maybe one of
them will blunder through it and
then we can go home."

Skarn smiled. "It is not quite that
simple. The qualifications are rather

restrictive, you know."

"I have read the content of the
Rule," Dork said haughtily. "Do
you imagine for one moment that
these barbarians possess such quali-
ties as love and wisdom and gener-
osity?"

"Yes,* said Skarn. "Yes, I do."

14

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

"Anyway, that's, not our prob-
lem. The Door will decide."

"True," Skarn said. "But there is
a problem. The Great Kom de-
signed the Door for the inhabitants
of a world that is unknown to us.
These — ah — barbarians may have
an entirely different mental make-
-up. That would mean that we would
have to adapt the Door to them, and
I must confess that I don't see how
to go about it. Some of the mechan-
ism is exceedingly strange."

"How do you know the Great
Kom did not design the Door for
the inhabitants of this world?"

Skarn blinked. "I suppose that is
possible. I hadn't thought of it."

"Everything else is arranged?"

"Completely. We have only to

throw the activating switch. The
relay stations are set up and op-
erating. Once the Door accepts a
specimen, it is immediately trans-
mitted all the way to the Royal
Museum. It is sealed into a speci-
men bottle before it knows what's
happened, and that's the end of it."

"How do you propose to go about
adapting the Door?"

Skarn got out a package of ciga-
rettes, fumbled awkwardly with a
cigarette lighter and got one lit. He
took a deep puff and went into a
fit of coughing. Dork glared at him
disdainfully, and Skarn ignored
him. He found the taste abominable
and the effect on his throat dis-
tressing, but the idea of blowing
smoke from his mouth and nose in-

trigued him. He had seen a carpen-*
ter blowing smoke rings and he was
determined to acquire that skill
himself. He would acquire it, even
if he had to transport a quantity of
these odd objects back to the Royal
University and spend the rest of his
life span practicing.

"I don't know that the Door will
have to be adapted," he said. "I
only acknowledge that possibility.
We must expose the Door to a large
number of these creatures and study
the reactions of the instruments. If
the instruments react normally, we
should be able to proceed. If not,
perhaps suitable adjustments will
occur to us."

Dork sneered. "And I suppose
these creatures will willingly pre-
sent themselves to us for study. We
have only to issue an invitation and
they will come and form a line in
front of the Door."

"Something like that," Skarn
agreed. "We merely announce an
odd ceremony which these natives
call 'open house.' It seems to be a
well-established custom. I under-
stand that a great many natives will
respond eagerly."

"I suppose there's no harm in try-
ing it," Dork said, a bit grudgingly.

ONATHAN SKARN' S open
house was a tremendous social
success. The entire population of
Centertown and the surrounding
territory attended. The wooded hill
was packed with cars, the highway

THE RULE OF THE DOOR

15

was lined with parked cars, and the
State Police had to call in reinforce-
ments to keep the traffic moving.

Jonathan Skarn, eccentric old
gentleman that he was, stationed
himself in the front yard, greeted
all the visitors warmly, and told
them to go right in and make them-
selves at home. This they did, and
after a rapacious assault on the
heavily laden refreshment tables,
they swarmed through the house.

Without exception, they emerged

disappointed. The door to the up-

stairs was kept locked. The utilities
room and the lavatory were, after

all, just a utilities room and a lava-
tory. And the living room, for all
its unusual size and expensive fur-
nishings, was not, as a bright high
school student remarked, anything
to write home about.

Since the quaint Mr. Skarn
remained outside, and since the
servants were busily engaged in
supplying the refreshment tables —
without, however, neglecting to
keep the upstairs door locked — the
guests pried into all of the strange,
empty closets, marveled at the thick
doors, and congregated in large
numbers around the center door
that looked exactly like the others,
but refused to open.

T1PSTAIRS in the laboratory,

^ Dork disgustedly watched
their antics in a viewer, and kept a
sharp eye on his busily recording
instruments.

And at the end of the day,

he announced to Skarn that they
had collected sufficient data.

The last of the guests had de-
parted, the servants had restored a
semblance of order to the house and
wearily headed homeward, and
Skarn and Dork relaxed on has-
socks in the laboratory and studied
the information which drifted slow-
ly across a wall screen.

"These creatures are little more
than animals," Dork declared. "But
then we might expect that, from
their hideous patches of hair, and
their odors, and the fact that they
occasionally kill one another, indi-
vidually or collectively. They hate,
they are dominated by greed and
jealousy, and I'd say they're totally
lacking in wisdom. Most of all, they
lust. It's thoroughly obnoxious. I
didn't find a single creature that the
Door would reject/'

Skarn was attempting to smoke
a cigar. The natural bluish tint to
his face had deepened to a violent
purple and he felt ill. He coughed
out a cloud of smoke and regarded
the cigar warily.

"Then our task should be a
simple one," he said.

"You," Dork exclaimed, "are
fully as disgusting as these natives!
Must you do that?"

"It is important that we under-
stand the ways of these creatures,"
Skarn said complacently.

"Surely we can understand with-
out degrading ourselves!"

16

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

QKARN deposited the cigar in
^ an ashtray. A touch of a button
and it disappeared. The apparent
ingenuity of the device, and its basic
crudeness, delighted him.

"Whatever else these creatures
may be," he said, "they are not

simple." He reached for another
cigar.

"I tested the Door this morning
with the servants," said Dork.

Skarn whirled about quickly and
dropped his cigar. "Without con-
sulting me?"

"It rejected them. I've noticed
how they will try to open it, now
and then, perhaps thinking we may
have left it unlocked. So, while they
were arranging the food, I activated
the Door. Both of them tried it."

"Of course," Skarn said scorn-
fully. "Why do you think I had this
house built? These creatures are
intelligent. That means they are
curious. Already the workmen have
spread the word about my mysteri-
ous Door. There is not a single
creature, young or old, who would
not attempt to open it if he had a
chance. But I want this understood
—I am in charge of this Assignment.
The Door is not to be activated
except by my orders."

Dork's eyes gleamed hatred, but
he gestured indifferently. "How
many glims do we sit around
waiting before you decide to use the
Door?"

"We must proceed cautiously. If
the Door had accepted one servant

»

with the other one present-

"What does it matter? We can
make our own departure as soon as
we've found a specimen. We'll leave
nothing that would reveal our
origin."

"No," Skarn said. "We must not
attract suspicion to ourselves. There
must be no witnesses when the Door
accepts a specimen. And we must
wait a suitable period of time so
that our departure will not be
connected with the disappearance.
These creatures may some day
learn to transmit themselves. We
do not want to leave the impres-
sion that they have enemies on
other worlds. Those are stern
orders from His Imperial Highness

himself."

"So how do we proceed?"

Skarn unlocked his desk and
removed a monumental stack of
papers. He dropped it on the floor,
restacked it when it toppled over,
and regarded it wearily.

"I have located an oddly func-
tioning organization which calls
itself a detective agency. It is
furnishing me with detailed reports
on every inhabitant of Centertown
and the entire surrounding country-
side. We have only to go through
the reports and ask ourselves, Is
this creature humble? Is he wise?
Is he the head of a family? And
so on. We shall select the few who
seem best-qualified and invite
them, one at a time, to be our
guests. Their curiosity will impel

THE RULE OF THE DOOR

17

them to try the Door. It will
certainly accept one of them. We
shall take action to divert suspicion
from ourselves, and after a suitable
waiting period, we shall dispose of
our house and leave."

"It is well arranged," Dork said
enviously. "But what a frightful
bother just to capture a specimen
for old Kegor!"

HE instruments of the Door—
those Skarn and Dork were
familiar with— reacted normally to
the natives. Those with which they
were not familiar reacted, normally
or not, they could not say. They
tested the transmitter relay, send-
ing through a stray dog, a cat, and
an assortment of live creatures that
Skarn obtained from a neighboring
farmer.

The Director of the Royal
Museum reacted promptly. Relay
working perfectly. All specimens
received in excellent condition and
already on display. His Imperial
Majesty highly pleased. Now—

With Dork, he spent hours sift-
ing through the stack of reports.
Three-fourths were immediately
eliminated— a figure that Skarn
thought spoke well for these na-
tives. The remaining fourth they
studied, compared and debated.
They reduced their list to a hun-
dred names, to fifty, and finally to
ten. Each of the ten they compared
conscientiously with the maxims of
the Great Kom. In the end, they
had four names.

"I don't think this was neces-
sary," Dork said. "But perhaps you
are right. This may be the more
efficient approach. Certainly the
Door will accept any of these
promptly."

Skarn nodded and shuffled the
reports. He was learning to smoke
a pipe. Already the effort had cost
him five teeth, and new teeth had
not yet grown in. His mouth
pained him as he grimly clutched
at the pipe stem. Whenever he
used his hand to support the bowl,
he burned himself. He bit down

where is the specimen of the intelli- hard on the stem, winced at the

gent creature?

Skarn advised the Director to
expect it momentarily. He closed
the Door and attached a small
metal plate that advised, "Push"
He activated the Door and stood
in front of it, listening to the pur-
ring of the instruments. He cau-
tiously attempted to push it himself
and found that it would not open.
Everything was ready.

pain, and carefully removed it. He
attempted a smoke ring, but the
smoke poured forth in a turbulent

cloud.

He read through the four reports

again. The Honorable Ernest
Schwartz, Mayor of Centertown.
Married. He and his wife hated
each other devoutly. He had no
children, no family dependent
upon him. There were multitudi-

18

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

nous rumors about him, to be
gleaned everywhere around Cen-
tertown. He was a liar. He was also
a thief. He had betrayed the trust
of his office repeatedly to enrich
himself. He had betrayed his
friends. He was greedy and evil.
He held affection for no one. He
had carried on affairs with the
wives of his friends, and pushed his
own wife into an affair for his
political advantage. He seemed to
bewitch the voters at election time.

Skarn frowned. Election time?
He would have to investigate that.
Whatever it meant, bewitching the
voters seemed an immoral thing to
do.

He turned to the next report.
Sam White, Centertown Chief of
Police. A bachelor, with no known
relatives. He kept his job, it was
said, by helping the mayor along
with his crooked schemes. Some of
his police officers called him a
petty tyrant. He was adept at ob-
taining confessions. He had several
times been accused of brutality '
toward prisoners.

Jim Adams, the Centertown
drunk. He never worked, lived off
his wife's meager earnings, and
beat his family mercilessly, drunk
or sober. Technically, he was the
head of a family; actually, the
family would be far better off

without him.

Elmer Harley, a ne'er-do-well
mechanic. A good mechanic, it was
said, when he worked at it. He had

been convicted and served jail
terms for several crimes. Terra
Haute police had given him a
standing order to stay out of town.
Centertown tolerated him warily.
He had no family and no friends.
He worked when he could, if he
felt like it, at either of Centertown's
two garages. One of the proprietors
liked him, it was said, because he
was skilled at padding repair bills.
That proprietor would have stood
high on Skarn's list, were it not for
the fact that he verifiedly loved his
wife and children.

"When do we start?" Dork
asked.

Skarn removed his pipe from his
lips, and made another blundering
attempt at a smoke ring. "Tomor-
row. I'll ask this Mayor Schwartz
to have dinner with me."

HE Honorable Ernest Schwartz
arrived precisely on time, driv-
ing a flashy late-model car. Skarn
met him at the door, shook his
hand politely and ushered him into
the living room. He took the may-
or's coat, hat and cane to one of
the closets, and turned to face his
guest.

Schwartz was a big man, hearty,
robust, his hair shining black de-
spite his sixty years. He wore a
mustache, trimmed meticulously.
He stood looking about the living
room, making commonplace com-
pliments about the house, and his
booming laugh filled the room.

THE RULE OF THE DOOR

19

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20

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

Skarn regarded him strangely.
He was seeing him, not as the
Honorable Mayor of Centertown,
Indiana, but as a specimen in
sealed plastic in the Royal Mu-
seum. He was seeing him as one of
a long row of bottled monstrosities
that His Majesty's patrol ships had
sent in from a multitude of planets.
He was seeing His Majesty him-
self, cackling with delight, leading
a noisy crowd of visiting dignitaries
through the displays, stopping to
point out Mayor Schwartz's ridicu-
lous black hair, his mustache, his
odd clothing, the sparkling cuff
links, the gold chain that hung
from his vest pocket.

It seemed wrong. Alien as it was,
Skarn could sense the man's per-
sonal charm. He was friendly. He
was obviously intelligent.

*

Skarn shrugged. The decision
was not his to make. The Door
would decide.

"Excuse me, please," he said. "I
do not like to entertain with serv-
ants around. I'll bring the food
myself. If you'll make yourself
comfortable . . ."

"Why, certainly," Schwartz
boomed. "Anything I can do to
help?"

"No, thank you. I can manage
nicely."

Skarn joined Dork in the labora-
tory and the two of them sat
watching Schwartz in the viewer.
Dork was jubilant.

"What a specimen he'll make,"

he gloated. "He's a big one. Do you
suppose the specimen bottle will
be big enough?"

"It held that thing they call a
calf," Skarn said. "It should hold
him."

Schwartz had taken a seat, but
the reflected light from the sign on
the Door caught his attention. He
got calmly to his feet, crossed the
room and read the label. The sign
instructed him to push. He pushed.
The Door resisted him firmly.

Dork exploded into an involved
series of Huzzian oaths. "I would
have sworn that there isn't a crea-
ture in our files better qualified
than that one."

Skarn was thoughtful. "So it
would seem. We must have made
a mistake. Perhaps I can find out
about it. If you care to watch . . ."

"Not me. His laugh gives me a
headache. I'm going to bed."

Skarn lowered a serving cart
and wheeled it into the living
room. The mayor hurriedly got to
his feet and helped him place the
dishes on the table. They took
their places and Skarn poured the
cocktails.

The mayor raised his glass and
said seriously, "May your residence
in Centertown be a long and happy

one.

»

"Thank you," Skarn said, feeling

strangely moved.

Skarn uncovered the dishes, and
the mayor sniffed hungrily. "I have
a confession to make," he said.

>

THE RULE OF THE DOOR

21

"The real reason I jumped at this
invitation was that I knew you'd
hired Lucy Morgan."

Skarn, still struggling to accus-
tom himself to the odd food these
natives delighted in, said indiffer-
ently, "She seems capable."

"Man, she's marvelous! She used
to work for me."

"Indeed? But then, if you liked
the food she prepared, why didn't
you keep her in .your employ-
ment?"

The mayor scowled. "Women
get funny notions. That was years
ago. Lucy was just in her early
twenties then, and my wife couldn't
get it through her head that it was
Lucy's cooking that I was inter-
ested in. You married yourself?"

"Not now," Skarn answered cau-
tiously.

The mayor nodded and helped
himself to steak. He concentrated
on his food and talked a little
between mouthfuls, mainly about
Centertown. Skarn ate sparsely
and tried to appear interested.

"I appreciate this," the mayor
said suddenly. "Don't often get a
quiet evening. The mayor's time

*

belongs to everyone, day or night.
Complaints about taxes, or the
garbage service, or a hole in the
street, or anything else. Each time
I'm elected, I swear it'll be the last
time. But here I am— ten straight
terms I've served, and I'll probably
go on until I die. Unless the voters
decide to throw me out."

"I don't understand this matter
of election," Skarn said. "We do
not have it where I come from."

"I figured you were one of these
refugees. Well, it seems simple to
us, but I suppose it really isn't.
Two or three men run for mayor,
and the people vote, and the one
that gets the most votes is elected.
For two years. Then there's an-
other election and the defeated
candidates try again. Or maybe
some new candidates. All it
amounts to is that the people
decide who runs things— those of
them that take the trouble to vote."

"This voting is not required?"

"Purely voluntary. Sometimes
the turnout isn't so hot."

CKARN considered this with a
^ deep frown. "Wouldn't it be
simpler just to have your—" he
thought a moment and attempted
a translation— "Director of Voca-
tional Assignments appoint a
mayor?"

"You're thinking of the city
manager sort of thing," the mayor
said. "Some places have them, but
it's usually the city council that
does the appointing. Then, of
course, they usually have mayors,
too."

Skarn squirmed uncomfortably
and tried again. "Your Director of
Vocational Assignments . . ."

"We haven't got anything like
that."

Skarn formulated his question

22

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

carefully. "Who assigns the voca-
tions?"

"Nobody. People work at what
they want to, if they can do it, or
at what they can get. It isn't like
those Iron Curtain countries. If a
man doesn't like his job, or his
boss, or if he can get something
better, he quits. The people run the
show here. Sometimes they get the
wool pulled over their eyes, but not
for long."

"But you're going to be mayor
until you die?"

"I suppose it'll work out that
way, unless the people throw me
out."

"When are you going to die?"

The mayor winced. "For God's
sake!" he bellowed, and dissolved
in laughter. "How do I know? I
might get hit by a car on the way
home, or drop dead from overeat-
ing. Or I might live to be a hun-
dred. What a question!"

Skarn's thoughts whirled dizzily.
The ideas were too much for him
and he couldn't cope with them.
He leaned back, staring at the
mayor.

"I came up the hard way," the
mayor said. "I made my money
honestly and I went into politics
honestly. I've kept my hands about
as clean as a politician can keep
them. Most of the people know
that, which is why they vote for

everyone personally and everyone
knows me. Every time a new baby
is born, I have a new boss. I'm as
happy as the proud parents. I
wouldn't have it any other way.
But politics is a dirty business.

"Some people had it all their
way before I was elected, and
there are always others who'd like
to have it their way. They've
pulled every foul trick in the
books. They've spread the damn-
edest lies about me. My wife just
can't take those things. We were
happily married until I got elected
mayor, and politics has ruined my
marriage. I suppose anything a
man accomplishes has its price, but
if I had it to do over again, I don't
know. Maybe I'd do it and maybe
I wouldn't." He grinned. 'Til tell
you what— I've got a book on the
American system of government.
I'll send it over. It explains things
a lot better than I could tell them
to you."

"I would appreciate that," Skarn
said. "I would appreciate that very
much."

CHIEF of Police Sam White
arrived on foot to be Skarn's
luncheon guest. A tall, slim, digni-
fied man, his manner was soft-
spoken and friendly. Skarn, on the
basis of his report, had visualized
him in some dismal cellar furiously

me. It's petty politics. I'm just a
big frog in a small puddle here

lashing a stubborn prisoner. But
the chief did not seem to belong
and I like it that way. I know in that role. Silvery-gray hair

THE RULE OF THE DOOR

23

crowned a wrinkled, sympathetic
face. There was gentleness in his
handshake, in his mannerisms, in
his voice- Skarn began to visualize
him in a different setting, in a
sealed specimen bottle, and felt un-
comfortable.

Skarii left him alone in the liv-
ing room, and he and Dork
watched anxiously from the labora-
tory. The chief shocked them
thoroughly by disdaining to so
much aS try the Door. Later, Skarn
lured him into making the attempt
by asking his assistance in opening
it. And the Door ignored him.

After lunch, they sat together on
the sofa and talked and smoked,
the chief describing his various
interests with dry humor and
Skarn listening intently. Did Skarn
ever do any fishing? Or hunting?

"I'll take you with me the next
time I go out," the chief said. "If
you're interested, that is." Skarn
was interested. "Ever play any
chess?" Skarn did not know the
game. ''Drop in sometime when
you're uptown. Things are usually
pretty cjuiet around the police de-
partment of a town this size. I'll
teach yc?u."

The chief sent a smoke ring
sailing across the room, and Skarn
looked #fter it enviously. His own
effort was a formless catastrophe.

When Skarn had stopped cough-
ing, the chief said gently, "You go
at it the wrong way. You can't
make a smoke ring by blowing.

You have to do it with your
mouth. Look."

Skarn watched, made the effort,
and failed.

"Try it again," the chief sug-
gested.

Skarn tried. His tenth effort was
a definite smoke ring, wobbly, lop-
sided and short-lived, but still a
ring. Skarn watched it with delight.

"Keep working at it," the chief
said. "A little practice and you'll
be an expert."

"I will," Skarn promised, and
felt forever beholden to him.

Afterward, Dork stormed an-
grily about the laboratory, and
Skarn restudied his reports. "The
Detective Agency is in error," he
announced. "Those men are not
evil."

"Just how do we know the
Detective Agency is not in error
on all the reports?"

"We don't," Skarn said. "We will
have to keep trying and find out
for ourselves."

JIM ADAMS arrived early that
evening, shabby, unshaven, tor-
ment in his eyes. He extended a
trembling hand for Skarn to shake
and whined, "I need a drink.
Haven't had one today. Will you
give me a drink?"

Skarn patted his back gently.
"Of course. You can have all you
want." He led the small, stumbling
figure into the living room. "I keep
it there— in the center closet. You

24

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

help yourself while I'm bringing

the food down."

Adams pushed at the door. He
hurled his weight against it. He
shrieked and kicked and clawed
and finally slumped to the floor
and sobbed brokenly, and Skarn
and Dork watched with sick dis-
gust. And still the Door would not
open.

Skarn went back down with the
food and a supply of liquor. Adams
ate little and drank much, drank
himself into a reeking, slobbering
intoxication, and finally passed out.
Skarn worked over his unconscious
body doubtfully and finally be-
came alarmed enough to call Sam

White.

"I have Jim Adams here for

dinner," he said, "and-

The chief chuckled. "Say no
more. I'll send someone to collect
him."

Adams' inert form was hauled
away, and Skarn felt both relieved
and puzzled.

"And just how do you account
for the Door's rejecting him?"
Dork demanded.

"I don't," Skarn said. "I can't
account for it at all."

»

T^LMER HARLEY thumped
■" belligerently on the door, and
he stood in the doorway and made
no motion to accept Skarn's out-
stretched hand. "Mind telling me
why you asked me out here?"
Skarn studied him gravely. He

n

was a muscular man of medium *
height. His dark hair was cut short.
A fine scar line curved around his
left cheek. His suit was worn, but
freshly pressed. He was clean-
shaven, neat-looking.

"I'm getting acquainted with
some of the people of Centertown,"
Skarn said anxiously. "I hope that
the invitation does not offend you."

Harley shrugged and held out
his hand. "Just wondered. I heard
you had Jim Adams up here:

"Why, yes, I did."

"And Sam White and the
mayor?"

"Yes."

"And now me. It doesn't make
sense to me."

i

Skarn smiled and escorted him
into the living room. "How much
of life does make sense?"

"You said a mouthful there."

"I'll bring the food down. The
liquor is in the middle closet. Pick
out what you'd like to have."

Harley nodded. A moment later,
watching from the laboratory,
Skarn and Dork saw him push
once on the Door, hard, and then
walk over to a sofa and sit down.

Dork stomped off to his bed-
room, and Skarn returned to the
living room with the serving cart.

"The door's locked," Harley said.

"It doesn't have a lock," Skarn
replied. "I'm afraid it's stuck. I've
been having trouble with it."

Harley jumped to his feet.
"That so? I'll take another look."

THE RULE OF THE DOOR

25

He applied his shoulder to the
door, and fell back a minute later,
red-faced and breathing heavily.
"It's really stuck. If you have some
tools, I'll see what I can do about
it."

"It's not that important," Skarn
said.

But Harley had turned to the
next closet. He pushed the thick
door inward and stood staring at
the hinges. "That's really slick.
Slides the door back and then lets
it open. Is the other door hung like
this one?"

"Why, yes," Skarn said.

"Let's see what could have gone
wrong.

V

H

ARLEY moved the door

slowly, watching the action of
the hinges. "Really slick," he said.
"I don't see how anything could
have gone wrong. Did you make
these things yourself?"

"Yes," Skarn lied, beginning to
feel embarrassed.

"You ought to patent them. You
could make some money out of
them."

"I'm afraid not many people use
doors this thick."

"There are lots of places they
might be used, with a hinge like
that. Safes and refrigerators, things
like that. If I was you, I'd patent
it."

"Thank you. I'll consider it,"
Skarn said. "Our food will be get-
ting cold."

Harley concentrated on his food
and ate hungrily. Afterward, he
settled himself in an overstuffed
chair and talked about automo-
biles, and Skarn listened atten-
tively and managed an occasional
smoke ring.

Harley knew automobiles. He
discussed them collectively and
individually, their good points and
weak points, their trade-in values,
their economy or lack of it, where
they were most likely to break
down, and why.

"When you get around to buy-
ing a car," he said, "ask me. I can
keep you from going wrong on a
new one, and if it's a used one, I
can tell you if you're getting your
money's worth."

"I'll remember that," Skarn
promised. "I've heard that you are
a very good mechanic."

"I get by."

"There doesn't seem to be much
for a good mechanic to do in
Center town."

"Not with the crooks that run
the garages here," Harley said
grimly.

Skarn studied him. He could not

see him as the man the report
described. He could not see him in

a specimen bottle. "If you had
your life to live over," he said, "is
there anything you'd do differ-
ently?" :

Harley smiled wistfully. "There

isn't much I'd do the same."
"For example?"

26

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

"I pulled a couple of jobs when
I was younger. Small stuff, but I
did some time. Now, whenever
anything happens, the police come
looking for me. Ex-con, you know.
I can't get a decent job. I should
never have come back to Center-

town, but my mother was here,
and my getting into trouble nearly
killed her. I couldn't make a home
for her anywhere else, just coming
out of the pen that way, so I came
back here to look after her. She
died four years ago and I'm still
here. In a rut."

SKARN met Dork in the labora-
tory after Harley left.

"I heard," said Dork. "He loved
his mother. That is considered an
overpowering virtue among these
creatures."

"Perhaps so," Skarn said.

"Invite one of them back," Dork
urged earnestly. "Any one. We can
put the door on manual and shove
him through and have done with it.
This planet won't be any worse
than it is without him, and he cer-
tainly won't do any harm in old
Kegor's museum. And we can go

home."

"No," Skarn said firmly. "We

must not contest the wisdom of the

Great Kom."

"What are you going to do
now?"

"I don't know. I must think the
matter out carefully. Perhaps there
are no evil creatures in this Center-

town. We may have to search else-
where."

Dork got to his feet and paced
the laboratory, his squat figure
leaning forward at a tense angle,
his eyes blazing angrily, his face a
violent shade of blue. "All right.
You are in charge. But I am going
to continue to invite these crea-
tures here and have them try the
Door. You can't deny me that."

"No," Skarn agreed. "I see no
objection to that. You may use the
reports and invite anyone you like.
If you don't succeed . . ."

"I shall succeed," Dork prom-
ised.

In the morning, there was a con-
fidential message from the Prime
Minister. Dork Diffack, the Prime
Minister said, had sent an alarming
report on Skarn's management of
the Assignment. Skarn, according
to the report, was deliberately
avoiding the selection of a proper
specimen and showing a suspicious
proclivity for the ways of the na-
tives. His Imperial Majesty was
angry. It was ordered that Skarn
forward a complete explanation
and find the desired specimen with-
out further delay.

Skarn sent off a report on Dork's
treasonable suggestion that a speci-
men be obtained without the Door's
approval. He installed a mental
lock at the controls, so Dork would
be unable to place the Door on
manual operation without Skarn's
consent.

THE RULE OF THE DOOR

27

Skarn walked down to Center-
town and wandered in and out of
the stores, making casual purchases
and attempting to engage the
clerks in conversation. They all
knew him— he was certain that
most of them had attended his

house— but thev seemed

open

strangely reserved in his presence.

HPHE initial topic of conversation
-*• was always the weather. Skarn
could understand that a relatively
primitive civilization which had
not yet learned to control the
weather might regard it with awe

*

and frustration. But he could not
understand why every individual
seemed to take a personal responsi-
bility for it being the kind of day
it was.

"Nice day/' a clerk would say.

"Oh, very," Skarn would concur.
He would make his purchase and
ask, "Do you know Jim Adams?"

"Who doesn't?" the clerk would
say, and move on to the next cus-
tomer.

"Do I know Chief White?" a
shoeshine boy said. "I ain't no
criminal!"

"What do I think of the mayor?"
a waitress said. "I aim to vote for
him. Another cup of coffee?"

"Why— ah— yes," Skarn said, and
drank it, though it nauseated him.

The natives he had invited to his
home had been friendly and talked
freely with him. Those he encoun-
tered about Centertown

were

28

friendly enough, if Skarn ap-
proached them first, but their
restraint puzzled him. What could
bring about such a fundamental
difference in their behavior? It was
a matter for psychological specula-
tion.

Skarn ate a revolting lunch at
the drugstore and then cautiously
descended the worn steps to the
basement of the rickety city hall,
where Police Headquarters were
located. Sam White was the only
one in the small headquarters room.
He sat with his chair tilted back,
his feet on his desk.

He nodded casually and pointed

at a chair. "What brings you to the

law?"

"I am making a social call,"

Skarn said politely.

"Make yourself comfortable. Not
many people come down here un-
less they have something to beef

about."

"I suppose you meet more than

your share of evil people," Skarn

said.

"I wouldn't say that. I really
don't believe there is such a thing
as an evil person. We get some bad
ones now and then, but there isn't
a one of them that couldn't have
been straightened out if he'd been
caught before he got too far out of

line."

"Do you really believe that?"
The chief smiled. "There is so
much good in the worst of us, and
so much bad in the best of us, that

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

it hardly behooves any of us to talk
about the rest of us. I might have
written that myself, if someone
hadn't beaten me to it*

"Do you really believe that?"
Skarn persisted.

"Of course I do. Sometimes it's
the only thing that keeps me going."

"And yet you sometimes find it
necessary to use violence on your
prisoners."

i^ HIEF White's feet hit the floor
^ with a crash. "Nobody in this
department uses violence on any-
body!"

"But I heard . . ."

"Sure, you heard. You hear that
about police anywhere. That's a
crook's last line of defense. Catch
him good and the only thing he can
do is try to blame something on
the police. We have to be pretty
damned careful to keep them from
getting away with it."

"I see," Skarn said.

The chief returned his feet to his
desk, and Skarn lit a cigarette and
sent a perfect smoke ring floating
across the room. The chief whistled.

"You've got that down pat. What
did I tell you?"

"Your prediction was profoundly
accurate."

«TJ'

I'll make another prediction. I
think you'll like chess. Want to
learn?"

Skarn watched curiously as the
chief got out the board and set the
oddly shaped pieces on it.

"This," the chief said, holding up
a black one, "is a knight."

Skarn reached for a white one,
the same shape. "And I suppose this
is a day."

The chief flapped his arms and
howled, and Skarn laughed with
him, wondering why.

It was dusk when Skarn walked
slowly back up the hill. Dork was
entertaining a guest— a female guest.
Skarn slipped up the stairway un-
noticed and flipped on the living
room viewer. He had carefully
avoided the native females in his
own tests. Their psychology seemed
infinitely more complex and their
motives obscured in fantastic ways.

He watched while Dork talked
with his female specimen. Dork
gave her money, and she turned and
walked resolutely over to the Door
and shoved against it. It failed to
open. A violent argument followed
and she flung the money at Dork
and left.

Dork did not offer to discuss the
incident and Skarn did not ask him
about it.

HP HE stores were not yet open
-■- when Skarn reached the down-
town part of Centertown the next
morning. He walked the length of
Main Street and back again, moving
slowly, finding an increasing num-
ber of faces which were familiar to
him. He started back up Main
Street a second time, and in front of
the Center Bar he met Jim Adams.

THE RULE OF THE DOOR

29

Adams squinted uncertainly at
Skarn and passed a trembling hand
across his face. "Oh, ifs you," he
said.

"Jonathan Skarn. Nice morning,
isn't it?" Skarn found that he
slipped easily into the native pat-
terns of conversation. "This place
will open in a few minutes. May I
buy you a drink?"

Adams said nothing. They were
the first customers, and Skarn fol-
lowed Adams up to the bar, paid for
the drink he ordered, and watched
as he downed it greedily.

"Another?" Skarn asked.

Adams wiped his mouth with the
back of his hand and stared blankly
at him. Skarn nodded at the bar-
tender, who refilled the glass.
Adams stood slumped over the bar.
Suddenly he clutched at the glass
and flung the contents into Skarn's
face.

"I'm killing myself fast enough,"
he said bitterly. "I don't need your
help."

Skarn accepted a paper napkin
from the bartender and wiped his
face dry. "Let's sit down," he said.
"Is there something you'd rather
have? Food, maybe?"

He led Adams over to a booth.

Adams squinted at him again,
this time incredulous. "You ain't
sore?"

"I think," Skarn said, "that you
are a sick man."

Adams buried his face in his arms
and sobbed. "When I ain't drunk,

I'm a louse, because I want to get
drunk. And when I'm drunk, I'm a
louse."

"Isn't there anything you can do
about it?"

"In this town? Big cities got Al-
coholics Anonymous and things like
that. Here there ain't nothing. Doc
Winslow says go in the hospital and
get cured. But that costs money, and
I ain't got money. Won't ever have
any, unless I get cured, and I can't
get cured unless I have some. So I
drink myself to death. Who the
hell cares?"

Skarn got to his feet and took a
firm grip on Adam's arm. "Let's go
and talk to your Doctor Winslow,"
he said.

A DAMS listened dumbly while
-^-Dr. Winslow struggled to de-
scribe hospital expenses in terms
acceptable to Skarn. The doctor
made a series of long-distance tele-
phone calls. He jovially slapped
Adams on the back. He shook hands
with Skarn. And, at noon, Skarn was
at the railroad station seeing that a
somewhat bewildered Adams got
aboard the train that would take
him to a hospital.

Mrs. Adams was there, a slight,
pale-faced woman, and with her
were the seven Adams children.
Mrs. Adams sank to her knees be-
fore Skarn and clutched his legs
tearfully. Skarn gently raised her to
her feet.

"It's quite all right," he said. "Jim

30

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

is going to come back cured. Aren't knew what to do about him. You

you, Jim?"

"I sure am," Adams promised.

"He's been a sick man, but he's
going to be all right. And then your
worries will be over."

"God bless you," Mrs. Adams
sobbed.

Skarn patted her shoulder awk-
wardly. "If you need anything in the
meantime," he heard himself say,
"don't hesitate to call on me."

After the train pulled out, Skarn
walked back to the Centertown
Bank and arranged to have a
weekly allowance paid to the
Adams family. Coming out of the
bank, he met Chief of Police White.

The chief's hand clamped un-
comfortably on Skarn's. "I heard
about what you did," he said. "Word
gets around fast in a small town
like this."

They walked together along
Main Street. The president of the
bank stopped to shake hands with
Skarn. Faces familiar and unfam-
iliar smiled and spoke pleasantly.
Good afternoon, Mr. Skarn. Nice
day, isn't it, Mr. Skarn? You're
looking well today, Mr. Skarn. In
one block, Skarn was offered seven
free beers, three dinners and a lodge
membership.

?? WfHAT happened?" he asked

™ the chief.

"Jim Adams has been kind of a

town problem for years. Everyone

felt responsible for him, but nobody

solved the problem at one crack.
That's what happened."

They paused in front of the city
hall and the chief gripped Skarn's
hand again. "These small towns are
peculiar places," he said. "A person
can come from outside and live in
one for years and never make the
grade. And then sometimes— well,
you're one of us now."

Mayor Schwartz lumbered up,
breathing heavily. "I chased you a
block," he panted. "Didn't you hear
me calling you?"

"No, I didn't," Skarn said. "I'm
very sorry if—"

"Heard what you did for Jim
Adams. Wonder why some of the
rest of us didn't think of it. Look,
we've got a vacancy on the planning
commission and I think you're just
the man for it. I've talked with the
council members, and if it's all right
with you, we'll make it official at the
meeting tonight."

"I'm afraid I don't understand,"
Skarn confessed.

"It's nothing complicated. The
commission meets once a month
and mostly just talks. But you're a
newcomer and you might see things
the rest of us have been overlooking
for years, like Jim Adams. Why not
give it a try? You can always resign
if it's too much of an imposition."

Skarn looked at the chief. The
chief nodded gravely.

"Why, yes," Skarn said. "I'd be
honored."

THE RULE OF THE DOOR

31

TIE FOUND Elmer Harley at

■*"■■ work in Merrel's Garage. Har-
ley slammed down a wrench and
went over and washed up before he
offered to shake hands warmly
with Skarn.

"Naw, nobody will care if I have
a beer with you," he answered
Skarn's question.

He followed Skarn across the
street to the Center Bar. They sat
down in a booth and the bartender
brought two beers. Skarn took a sip
and grimaced.

"I heard what you did for Jim
Adams," Harley said. "And—hell, it
was a fine thing to do."

"Do you think he will reform?"
Skarn asked.

"With half a chance, I'm sure he
will."

"Then it was time someone did
something about it."

Harley nodded slowly and sipped
his beer. "Jim never was a bad guy.

He was weak and he got himself
trapped. You thinking of reforming
me?"

"I had given it some thought,"
Skarn conceded.

"I suppose it's time somebody did
something about that, too."

"I was thinking of opening a
garage," Skarn said. "An honest
garage. Do you think there's a place
for one here?"

"There's a place for an honest
garage anywhere."

"Do you think you could run one
for me?"

^

Harley half rose to his feet. "Try
me!"

-

"You look around and see if you
can find a place for it and make an
estimate of what you'd need."

"Right away," Harley said. "As
soon as I tell Merrel to go to hell."

The house was dark when Skarn
returned, dark upstairs and down.
He did not bother with lights. He
moved easily through the darkness
to the laboratory, heard Dork's
quick breathing, and settled on a
hassock near him. Dork preferred

32

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

the darkness. He did not like the one?"

*

p

confusing alteration of night and
day. On his native planet, it was
always either dark or never dark,
and Dork claimed that the revolu-
tions of this primitive planet en-
dangered his health.

They sat in the gloom in silence.
After a while, Skarn lit a cigarette,
and Dork winced at the flash of
light.

"Do

have

specimen

you nave a
ready?" he demanded.

"No," Skarn said. "Do you have

"I heard about what you've been
doing. Fve made a full report. I have
a reply. You are relieved of the
Assignment. You are to report back
to the Mother Planet immediate-
ly — without delay."

Skarn smiled. "And you are to
complete the Assignment, no
doubt."

"On personal orders from His
Imperial Majesty."

"Following the Rule of the Door
explicitly, I suppose."

THE RULE OF THE DOOR

33

TTIORK'S laiigh was hideous. "The
■■-^ Great Kom won't know it.
What His Imperial Majesty
doesn't know won't hurt him. What
you say won't matter, because no
one will believe you. Your handling
of the Assignment has been a dis-
grace, Skarn Skukarn. I very much
doubt that you will be allowed to
fulfill your span of living."

"Would you mind telling me how
you plan to obtain a specimen?"
asked Skarn.

"I will invite your specimens
back. Three of them, since you have
sent one away. I'll send them all
through and get away from this
cursed planet."

"The Door won't accept them. I
doubt if it will accept any resident
of Centertown."

"What the Door decides won't
matter. I'll operate it on manual."

"I have the controls on mental
lock. I won't release them to you."

"You'll release them," Dork said.
"There are worse penalties than
death, you know."

Skarn sat lost in thought. Life on
the Mother Planet, and the queer
ways it contrasted with life on this
alien world. The young wife he had
loved, and the exalted minister who
had taken her from him. The work
he had left unfinished in his labora-
tory at the Royal University. The
time left of his life span. He tried to
imagine how it must be for these
natives, who left their life spans to
chance and disease, instead of mak-

ing them a matter of law.

He thought, and compared, and
made his decision. "These natives
are friends of mine. Skarn Skukarn
does not betray a friend."

"I will ask for new equipment,"
Dork said.

"Regardless of my status, I be-
lieve I can make known the reason
for your request. I don't think it will
be granted."

Dork leaped to his feet. "What
was that?" He activated the viewer
and his hand closed on Skarn's arm.
"Someone is downstairs."

Skarn adjusted the viewer and
flooded the living room with invis-
ible light.

"We have a visitor," Dork said.
"Skarn, we're being robbed!"

They watched the shabby figure
fumble awkwardly through the
darkness, feeling his way forward,
clumsily moving around the furni-
ture. A handkerchief covered the
face below the eyes.

"He's heard about our Door,"
Skarn said. "He probably thinks we
keep riches behind it."

Dork clapped his hands and said

i

gleefully, "This resolves our prob-
lem. The Door will certainly accept
a specimen that approaches it in an
evil act."

"His evil act may have a noble
purpose," Skarn said.

HPHE intruder blundered his way

•*• across the room, lunged into one

of the closets, came out again and

34

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

moved along the wall toward the
Door. Dork sucked his breath in
noisily and released it in a spasm of
profanity when the Door failed to
move.

"Set the Door on manual," he
said. "I'll send him through. No one
knows he's here. No one will miss
him. We can get off the damnable
world immediately."

"The Rule of the Door . . *

"Damn the Rule! He's an evil
man, isn't he? This planet will be a
better place without him, won't it?"

"I don't know."

"Do you know this native? Do
you claim him for a friend?"

"No," Skarn said. "I don't know
him."

"Set the Door on manual," Dork
ordered. There was sneering author-
ity in his voice. He swaggered away.

Skarn sank back wearily. The
Great Kom had been wiser than he
had ever imagined to devise such a
door. Perhaps it was never meant to
open. Who could say, after all, that
the Imperial Majesty of that an-
cient time had actually obtained an
intelligent specimen by way of the
Door? Perhaps in his immortal wis-
dom the Great Kom had devised a
plan that would prevent the Im-
perial Majesty from obtaining a
specimen. And now this— this cir-
cumventing of the Door. It was a
terrible thing.

Let Dork do what he could,
Skarn would not do it. He could not.

was assaulting the Door with his
shoulder. The lights came on, and

Dork entered the room. He raised

his hands in mock fear as the thief

pointed a gun at him.

"Certainly I'll open it for you," he
said. "Come and help me push."

Dork moved toward the door,
with the thief close behind him. He
paused, half turned to say some-
thing, and suddenly the Door jerked
open. Dork was sucked through in
an instant, and the Door slammed
in the face of the startled thief who
beat upon it angrily.

CKARN jerked to his feet and
^ stood there, fists clenched, his
mind paralyzed with shock. At
length he controlled himself and vis-
ualized what was happening, know-
ing that while he thought about it, it
had already happened— the body of
Dork Diffack whipped at many
times the speed of light from relay
station to relay station across space,
and sealed instantaneously into a
specimen bottle at the Royal Mu-
seum, to the colossal consternation
of the attendants. They would rec-
ognize him immediately, of course.
But it would be too late.

The secret of the Door came to
Skarn clearly, and he humbly
bowed to the memory of the Great
Kom. The door had been attuned to
the characteristics of one people, and
one people only, and those people
had been the inhabitants of Dork's

In the room below, the intruder planet of Huzz, discovered back in

THE RULE OF THE DOOR

35

those remote times when ships of Perhaps His Imperial Majesty

the Empire were first creeping out-
ward from the Mother Planet. The
Door had been designed so that only
a creature like Dork would be ac-
cepted, a creature devoid of love
and friendship and kindness, an evil
creature, caught in an act of evil,
entangled in his own sinister plot
against another intelligent being.
The wisdom of the Great Kom was
absolute.

Skarn acted quickly. He dared
not return to the Mother Planet.
But he liked these natives. He liked
their world. He admired the free-
dom they enjoyed and the blend of
good and bad in their characters. He
had many years to live, by the way
these natives measured time. He
had the store of precious metals
furnished him for his assignment.
He had the house. He had his lab-
oratory, small as it was. He had—
yes, in Centertown he had friends.

He opened a panel in the wall
and closed the switch that sent the
transmitter hurtling back through
space. In succession, the relay sta-
tions would fold in on each other
and all return to the Mother Planet.

would send an expedition for him;
perhaps not. It didn't matter. Only
Dork knew exactly where Skarn
was located on this planet, and
Dork's knowledge was safe for an
eternity. So was Skarn.

He picked up the telephone and
called Sam White. "I have been re-
flecting upon that game which you
call chess. I believe the next time

*

I can defeat you. Is it too late to try
tonight?"

"Hell, no!" said the chief. "Come
on over."

"Shortly," Skarn said. "I have a
small matter to attend to here."

Skarn met the thief as he came
out of the central closet. He para-
lyzed him with a nerve gun, took the
threatening revolver and released
him. The young eyes that stared at
him over the handkerchief were ter-
rified.

"What happened to that guy?
That closet— it's empty!"

"Of course it's empty," Skarn
said. "That's why the door opened
so easily. Now tell me, why is it that
you need money?"

LLOYD HIGGLE, JR.

LEARN TO PREDICT YOUR FUTURE: Are you helplessly
drifting with the tides of life?

You can learn to control your future.

Individual processing Intensives.
Write REGISTRAR OF SCIENTOLOGY

Hubbard Guidance Center,

1812 19th Street, N. W.

Washington, D. C.

36

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

TH

By WALTER S. TEVIS

Seeing it in action, anybody
would quaver in alarm: What
hath Farnsworth overwrought?

Illustrated by JOHNSON

ET me show you some-
thing," Farnsworth said.
He set his near-empty

drink— a Bacardi martini — on the
mantel and waddled out of the
room toward the basement.

I sat in my big leather chair,
feeling very peaceful with the
world, watching the fire. Whatever
Farnsworth would have to show to-
night would be far more entertain-
ing than watching T.V.— my cus-
tom on other evenings. Farnsworth,

with his four labs in the house and
his very tricky mind, never failed
to provide my best night of the
week.

When he returned, after a mo-
ment, he had with him a small box,
about three inches square. He held
this carefully in one hand and
stood by the fireplace dramatical-
ly—or as dramatically as a very
small, very fat man with pink
cheeks can stand by a fireplace of
the sort that seems to demand a

THE BIG BOUNCE

37

big man with tweeds, pipe and,
perhaps, a saber wound.

Anyway, he held the box dra-
matically and he said, "Last week,
I was playing around in the chem
lab, trying to make a new kind of
rubber eraser. Did quite well with
the other drafting equipment, you
know, especially the dimensional
curve and the photosensitive ink.
Well, I approached the job by try-
ing for a material that would ab-
sorb graphite without abrading
paper."

I was a little disappointed with
this; it sounded pretty tame. But
I said. "How did it come out?"

size of a golfball and set the box
on the mantel.

"And that's the -eraser?" I
asked.

"Yes," he said. Then he squatted
down, held the ball about a half-
inch from the floor, dropped it.

It bounced, naturally enough.
Then it bounced again. And again.
Only this was not natural, for on
the second bounce the ball went
higher in the air than on the first,
and on the third bounce higher
still. After a half minute, my eyes
were bugging out and the little ball
was bouncing four feet in the air
and going higher each time.

I grabbed my glass. "What the
hell!" I said.

Farnsworth caught the ball in a
material, all right, and it seems to pudgy hand and held it. He was

H

E screwed his pudgy face up
thoughtfully. "Synthesized the

smiling a little sheepishly. "Inter-
esting effect, isn't it?"

"Now wait a minute," I said,
beginning to think about it.
"What's the gimmick? What kind
of motor do you have in that
thing?"

His eyes were wide and a little
hurt. "No gimmick, John. None at
all. Just a very peculiar molecular
structure."

"Structure!" I said. "Bouncing
balls just don't pick up energy out
of nowhere, I don't care how their
molecules are put together. And
you don't get energy out without
putting energy in."

"Oh," he said, "that's the really
and withdrew a gray ball about the interesting thing. Of course you're

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

work, but the interesting thing is
that it has a certain— ah— secondary
property that would make it quite
awkward to use. Interesting prop-
erty, though. Unique, I am inclined
to believe."

This began to sound more like
it. "And what property is that?"
I poured myself a shot of straight
rum from the bottle sitting on the
table beside me. I did not like
straight rum, but I preferred it to
Farnsworth's rather imaginative
cocktails.

"I'll show you, John," he said.
He opened the box and I could
see that it was packed with some
kind of batting. He fished in this

38

right; energy does go into the ball.
Here, I'll show you."

He let the ball drop again and

>

it began bouncing, higher and
higher, until it was hitting the
ceiling. Farnsworth reached out to
catch it, but he fumbled and the
thing glanced off his hand, hit
the mantelpiece and zipped across
the room. It banged into the far
wall, richocheted, banked off three
other walls, picking up speed all
the time.

When it whizzed by me like a
rifle bullet, I began to get wor-
ried, but it hit against one of the
heavy draperies by the window
and this damped its motion enough
so that it fell to the floor.

T T started bouncing again im-
•*• mediately, but Farnsworth
scrambled across the room and
grabbed it. He was perspiring a
little and he began instantly to
transfer the ball from one hand to
another and back again as if it
were hot.

"Here," he said, and handed it
to me.

I almost dropped it.

"It's like a ball of ice!" I said.
"Have you been keeping it in the
refrigerator?"

"No. As a matter of fact, it was
at room temperature a few minutes
ago."

"Now wait a minute," I said.
"I pnly teach physics in high
school, but I know better than that.

Moving around in warm air doesn't
make anything cold except by
evaporation."

"Well, there's your input and
output, John," he said. "The ball
lost heat and took on motion.
Simple conversion."

My jaw must have dropped to
my waist. "Do you mean that that
little thing is converting heat to
kinetic energy?"

"Apparently."

"But that's impossible!"

He was beginning to smile
thoughtfully. The ball was not as
cold now as it had been and I was
holding it in my lap.

"A steam engine does it," he
said, "and a steam turbine. Of
course, they're not very efficient."

"They work mechanically, too,
and only because water expands
when it turns to steam."

"This seems to do it differently,"
he said, sipping thoughtfully at his
dark-brown martini. "I don't know
exactly how *~ maybe something
piezo-electric about the way its
molecules slide about. I ran some
tests— measured its impact energy
in foot pounds and compared that
with the heat loss in BTUs.
Seemed to be about 98 per cent
efficient, as close as I could tell.
Apparently it converts heat into
bounce very well. Interesting, isn't
it?"

"Interesting?" I almost came fly-
ing out of my chair. My mind was
beginning to spin like crazy. "If

THE BIG BOU

39

you're not pulling my leg with
this thing, Farnsworth, you've got
something by the tail there that's
just a little bit bigger than the
discovery of fire."

He blushed modestly,
rather thought that myself," he ad-
mitted.

"Good Lord, look at the heat
that's available!" I said, getting
really excited now.

«T>

I'd

T^ARNS WORTH was still smil-
■*• ing, very pleased with him-
self. "I suppose you could put this
thing in a box, with convection
fins, and let it bounce around in-
side-" .

arr

I'm way ahead of you," I said.
"But that wouldn't work. All your
kinetic energy would go right back
to heat, on impact— and eventually
that little ball would build up
enough speed to blast its way
through any box you could build."
"Then how would you work it?"
"Well," I said, choking down the
rest of my rum, "you'd seal the
ball in a big steel cylinder, attach
the cylinder to a crankshaft and
flywheel, give the thing a shake
to start the ball bouncing back and
forth, and let it run like a gaso-
line engine or something. It would
get all the heat it needed from
the air in a normal room. Mount
the apparatus in your house and it
would pump your water, operate
a generator and keep you cool
at the same time!"

I sat down again, shakily, and
began pouring myself another
drink.

Farnsworth had taken the ball
from me and was carefully putting
it back in its padded box. He was
visibly showing excitement, too;
I could see that his cheeks were
ruddier and his eyes even brighter
than normal. "But what if you
want the cooling and don't have
any work to be done?"

"Simple," I said. "You just let
the machine turn a flywheel or
lift weights and drop them, or
something like that, outside your
house. You have an air intake in-
side. And if, in the winter, you
don't want to lose heat, you just
mount the thing in an outside
building, attach it to your genera-
tor and use the power to do what-
ever you want— heat your house,
say. There's plenty of heat in the
outside air even in December."

"John," said Farnsworth, "you
are very ingenious. It might work."

"Of course it'll work." Pictures
were beginning to light up in my
head. "And don't you realize that
this is the answer to the solar
power problem? Why, mirrors and
selenium are, at best, ten per cent
efficient! Think of big pumping
stations on the Sahara! All that
heat, all that need for power, for
irrigation!" I paused a moment for

■

effect. "Farnsworth, this can
change the very shape of the
Earth!"

40

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

Farnsworth seemed to be lost for circulating hot air around the

in thought. Finally he looked at
me strangely and said, "Perhaps
we had better try to build a

model."

WAS so excited by the thing
that I couldn't sleep that night.
I kept dreaming of power stations,
ocean liners, even automobiles, be-
ing operated by balls bouncing
back and forth in cylinders.

I even worked out a spaceship
in my mind, a bullet-shaped af-
fair with a huge rubber ball on
its end, gyroscopes to keep it
oriented properly, the ball serving
as solution to that biggest of mis-
sile-engineering problems, excess

heat. You'd build a huge concrete
launching field, supported all the

*

way down to bedrock, hop in the
ship and start bouncing. Of course
it would be kind of a rough ride . . .

In the morning, I called my
superintendent and told him to get
a substitute for the rest of the
week; I was going to be busy.

Then I started working in the
machine shop in Farnsworth's
basement, trying to turn out a
working model of a device that,
by means of a crankshaft, oleo
dampers and a reciprocating cylin-
der, would pick up some of that
random kinetic energy from the
bouncing ball and do something
useful with it, like turning a drive
shaft. I was just working out a
convection-and-air pump system

ball when Farnsworth came in v

He had tucked carefully under
his arm a sphere of about the size
of a basketball and, if he had
made it to my specifications,
weighing thirty-five pounds. He
had a worried frown on his fore-
head.

"It looks good," I said. "What's
the trouble?"

"There seems to be a slight
hitch," he said. "I've been testing
for conductivity. It seems to be
quite low."

"That's what I'm working on
now. It's just a mechanical prob-
lem of pumping enough warm air
back to the ball. We can do it
with no more than a twenty per
cent efficiency loss. In an engine,
that's nothing."

"Maybe you're right. But this
material conducts heat even less
than rubber does."

"The little ball yesterday didn't
seem to have any trouble," I said.

"Naturally not. It had had plen-
ty of time to warm up before I
started it. And its mass-surface
area relationship was pretty low
—the larger you make a sphere,
of course, the more mass inside in
proportion to the outside area."

"You're right, but I think we
can whip it. We may have to
honeycomb the ball and have part
of the work the machine does oper-
ate a big hot air pump; but we
can work it out."

THE BIG BOUNCE

41

LL that day, I worked with mediately awake. Something, prob-
lathe, milling machine and ably a heavy truck, had started a
hacksaw. After clamping the new tiny oscillation in that ball. And

the ball had been heavy enough
to start the table bouncing with
it until, by dancing that table
around the room, it had literally
torn the clamp off and shaken
itself free. What had happened
afterward was obvious, with the
ball building up velocity with
every successive bounce.

But where was the ball now?

big ball securely to a workbench,
Farnsworth pitched in to help me.
But we weren't able to finish by
nightfall and Farnsworth turned
his spare bedroom over to me for
the night. I was too tired to go
home.

And too tired to sleep soundly,
too. Farnsworth lived on the edge
of San Francisco, by a big truck
by-pass, and almost all night I
wrestled with the pillow and
sheets, listening half-consciously to
those heavy trucks rumbling by,
and in my mind, always, that little
gray ball, bouncing and bouncing
and bouncing . . .

At daybreak, I came abruptly
fully awake with the sound of
crashing echoing in my ears, a bat-
tering sound that seemed to come
from the basement. I grabbed my
coat and pants, rushed out of the
room, almost knocked over Farns-
worth, who was struggling to get
his shoes on out in the hall, and
we scrambled down the two flights
of stairs together.

The place was a chaos, battered
and bashed equipment everywhere,
and on the floor, overturned
against the far wall, the table that
the ball had been clamped to. The
ball itself was gone.

I had not been fully asleep all
night, and the sight of that mess,
and what it meant, jolted me im-

Suddenly Farnsworth cried out
hoarsely, "Look!" and I followed
his outstretched, pudgy finger to
where, at one side of the base-
ment, a window had been broken
open— a small window, but plenty
big enough for something the size
of a basketball to crash through
it.

There was a little weak light
coming from outdoors. And then
I saw the ball. It was in Farns-
worth's back yard, bouncing a little
sluggishly on the grass. The grass
would damp it, hold it back, until
we could get to it. Unless . . .

I took off up the basement steps
like a streak. Just beyond the back
yard, I had caught a glimpse of
something that frightened me. A
few yards from where I had seen
the ball was the edge of the big
six-lane highway, a broad ribbon
of smooth, hard concrete.

I got through the house to the
back porch, rushed out and was
in the back yard just in time to

42

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

wmm

THE BIG BOUNCE

43

see the ball take its first bounce
onto the concrete. I watched it,
fascinated, when it hit— after the
soft, energy absorbing turf, the
concrete was like a springboard.
Immediately the ball flew high in
the air. I was running across the
yard toward it, praying under my
breath, Fall on that grass next
time.

It hit before I got to it, and
right on the concrete again, and
this time I saw it go straight up at
least fifty feet.

MY mind was suddenly full of
thoughts of dragging mat-
tresses from the house, or making
a net or something to stop that
hurtling thirty-five pounds; but I
stood where I was, unable to move,
and saw it come down again on
the highway. It went up a hun-
dred feet. And down again on the
concrete, about fifteen feet further
down the road. In the direction of
the city.

That time it was two hundred
feet, and when it hit again, it made
a thud that you could have heard
for a quarter of a mile. I could
practically see it flatten out on
the road before it took off upward
again, at twice the speed it had
hit at.

Suddenly generating an idea, I
whirled and ran back to Farns-
worth's house. He was standing in
the yard now, shivering from the
morning air, looking at me like a

little lost and badly scared child.

"Where are your car keys?" I
almost shouted at him.

"In my pocket."

"Come on!"

I took him by the arm and half
dragged him to the carport. I got
the keys from him, started the car,
and by mangling about seven traf-
fic laws and three prize rosebushes,
managed to get on the highway,
facing in the direction that the ball
was heading.

"Look," I said, trying to drive
down the road and search for the
ball at the same time. "It's risky,
but if I can get the car under it
and we can hop out in time, it
should crash through the roof. That
ought to slow it down enough for
us to nab it."

"But— what about my car?"
Farns worth bleated.

"What about that first building—
or first person— it hits in San Fran-
cisco?"

"Oh," he said. "Hadn't thought
of that."

I slowed the car and stuck my
head out the window. It was
lighter now, but no sign of the
ball. "If it happens to get to town
—any town, for that matter— it'll
be falling from about ten or twen-
ty miles. Or forty."

"Maybe it'll go high enough first
so that it'll burn. Like a meteor."

"No chance," I said. "Built-in
cooling system, remember?"

Farnsworth formed his mouth

44

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

into an "Oh" and exactly at that of an egg now. I adjusted the car's-

moment there was a resounding
thump and I saw the ball hit in
a field, maybe twenty yards from
the edge of the road, and take off
again. This time it didn't seem to
double its velocity, and I figured
the ground was soft enough to hold
it back — but it wasn't slowing
down either, not with a bounce fac-
tor of better than two to one.

TWT ITHOUT watching for it to
" go up, I drove as quickly as
I could off the road and over—
carrying part of a wire fence with
me— to where it had hit. There was
no mistaking it; there was a de-
pression about three feet deep, like
a small crater.

I jumped out of the car and

position, jumped out and ran for
my life.

It hit instantly after— about six-
ty feet from the car. And at the
same time, it occurred to me that
what I was trying to do was com-
pletely impossible. Better to hope
that the ball hit a pond, or bounced
out to sea, or landed in a sand
dune. All we could do would be to
follow, and if it ever was damped
down enough, grab it.

It had hit soft ground and
didn't double its height that time,
but it had still gone higher. It was
out of sight for almost a lifelong
minute.

And then— incredibly rotten luck
—it came down, with an ear-shat-
tering thwack, on the concrete

stared up. It took me a few sec- highway again. I had seen it hit,

onds to spot it, over my head. One
side caught by the pale and slant-
ing morning sunlight, it was only
a bright diminishing speck.

The car motor was running and
I waited until the ball disappeared
for a moment and then reappeared.
I watched for another couple of
seconds until I felt I could make
a decent guess on its direction, hol-
lered at Farnsworth to get out of
the car— it had just occurred to
me that there was no use risking
his life, too— dove in and drove
a hundred yards or so to the spot
I had anticipated.

I stuck my head out the win-
dow and up. The ball was the size

and instantly afterward I saw a
crack as wide as a finger open
along the entire width of the road.
And the ball had flown back up
like a rocket.

My God, I was thinking, now it
means business. And on the next
bounce . . .

It seemed like an incredibly
long time that we craned our
necks, Farnsworth and I, watching
for it to reappear in the sky. And
when it finally did, we could hard-
ly follow it. It whistled like a
bomb and we saw the gray streak
come plummeting to Earth al-
most a quarter of a mile away from
where we were standing.

THE BIG BOUNCE

45

But we didn't see it go back up
again.

For a moment, we stared at each
other silently. Then Farnsworth al-
most whispered, "Perhaps it's
landed in a pond."

"Or in the world's biggest cow-
pile," I said. "Come on!"

We could have met our deaths
by rock salt and buckshot that
night, if the farmer who owned that
field had been home. We tore up
everything we came to getting
across it— including cabbages and
rhubarb. But we had to search for
ten minutes, and even then we
didn't find the ball.

I scrambled down in it and picked
up one of the pieces, using my
handkerchief, folded— there was no
telling just how cold it would be.
It was the stuff, all right. And
colder than an icicle.

I climbed out. "Let's go home,"
I said.

Farnsworth looked at me
thoughtfully. Then he sort of
cocked his head to one side and
asked, "What do you suppose will
happen when those pieces thaw?"

I stared at him. I began to think
of a thousand tiny slivers whiz-
zing around erratically, richochet-
ing off buildings, in downtown San

What we found was a hole in Francisco and in twenty counties,

the ground that could have been
a small-scale meteor crater. It was

and no matter what they hit, mov-
ing and accelerating as long as

a good twenty feet deep. But at there was any heat in the air to

the bottom, no ball. give them energy.

And then I saw a tool shed, on
STARED wildly at it for a the other side of the pasture from

us.

But Farnsworth was ahead of
me, waddling along, puffing. He

got the shovels out and handed one
to me.

We didn't say a word, neither
of us, for hours. It takes a long
time to fill a hole twenty feet deep
—especially when you're shoveling
very, very carefully and packing
down the dirt very, very hard.

WALTER S. TEVIS

full minute before I focused my
eyes enough to see, at the bottom,
a thousand little gray fragments.

And immediately it came to
both of us at the same time. A
poor conductor, the ball had used
up all its available heat on that
final impact. Like a golfball that
has been dipped in liquid air and
dropped, it had smashed into thin
splinters.

The hole had sloping sides and

• * * • •

46

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

> * *

U**I

iSjAi

•M

iMIUBiTAW

TO5

• * *

°T?v5vI v?V- : ••'• :•*'•■

O begin somewhere, let us
consider an utterance of a
man who was just about
the most famous naturalist of his
time, namely Georges Leopold
Chretien Frederic Dagobert, Baron
de Cuvier. He is called both the
Father of Paleontology and the
Father of Comparative Anatomy,
and during his lifetime he was
Titular Professor at the Jardin des

Plantes (as the Paris Zoo is still
misleadingly called ) , Chancellor

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

47

/

of the University of Paris and a

high government official of cabinet
rank.

Georges Cuvier died 126 years
ago, in 1832. Shortly before his
death— say, around 1830— he said
in the course of a lecture that the
naturalists of the future would
have to concentrate on extinct ani-
mals, since no new discoveries of
large living animals were to be
expected any more.

One might say that he was sta-
tistically right, even if he was
wrong otherwise.

In the years since his death,
several thousand species of extinct
animals have been dug up and
described, while only a few dozen
large living animals have been
discovered. And at first it must
even have seemed as if Cuvier
might be literally right, for two
full decades went by without a
noteworthy discovery. Then the
"spell" was broken by the Eng-
lish traveler Hodgson who, in
1850, reported a new large mam-
mal from Tibet.

It was the Takin (Budorcas
taxicolor), also called the Gnu
Antelope and best described as a
very large and heavy mountain
goat of dull brown color. It is
rarely seen in zoological gardens,
and if a garden does acquire one,
the keeper is likely to be unhappy,
for the Takin exudes a penetrating
and offensive smell every minute
of its life.

COME five years later, there
^ came three more discoveries,
all connected with the name of
Pere (Father) Armand David.
The home of all three is China
and they were vaguely known to

the Chinese.

One of them was called bei-
shun, which simply means "white
bear" and which was said to live

"in the mountains"

this being

Asia, that term can cover a very
large number of square miles.
When Father David finally got
hold of one, it turned out (Fig. 1)
to be the Giant Panda (Ailuro-
poda melanoleucus ) ; its cousin, the
Lesser Panda, had been known for
about half a century and was
usually called Himalaya Raccoon.

The second of Father David's
discoveries was a monkey. Its pic-
ture was known, because Chinese
artists had painted it on vases and
similar items. But it had always
been thought to be just an artistic
convention; a monkey with such
a wildly colored fur and such a
"little Lulu" nose obviously could
not exist. Father David proved
with skins and skeletons that it did
and the scientific name became
Rhinopithecus roxellanae, often re-
ferred to as the roxellana monkey
or, sometimes, snow monkey.

The third discovery was even
more unusual. Father David knew,
like everybody else, about a
walled-in Imperial Hunting Park
near Peking. He also knew that

48

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

no Chinese emperor had actually
hunted there for centuries and that
it was strictly forbidden to enter
it. So one day he climbed the wall
to see the animals inside.

Among herds of well-known
game animals, Father David saw
a large stag; he was sure that
this animal was new to science.
The Chinese called it sse-pu-hsiang
which means "not like four" and
is supposed to express the idea
that the animal does not look like
a stag, not like a horse, not like a
cow and not like a goat. Another
and simpler name, which became
known later, is Milu.

Father David obtained antlers

and skin

probably by bribing

the guards; he never said how he
did it — and sent them to Paris. A
gift of live specimens was then ar-
ranged through diplomatic chan-
nels and Alphonse Milne-Edwards
in Paris gave the scientific name
Elaphurus davidianus, popularly
known as Pere David's Deer (Fig.

2).

The subsequent history of Pere
David's Deer is one of those stories
one would not believe if one read
it in a novel. Pere David's Deer
existed only in the Imperial Hunt-
ing Park; it had become extinct
everywhere else centuries ago.
Then, in 1895, there was a flood
and a famine and the hungry peo-
ple ate all the animals in the Im-
perial Park. But a few specimens
of Pere David's Deer had been

bought by the Duke of Bedford.
They have turned into a large
herd, so now the animal lives only
in England (plus a few of the big-
ger zoological gardens).

T the same time when Pere
David's Deer was described
in Paris, another new animal was
described in England in the Pro-
ceedings of the Zoological Society.
It was an antelope, the so-called
Lesser Koodoo (Strepsiceros im-
berbis) which had lived unnoticed
in East Africa.

Then there was a hiatus lasting
just about a decade, until 1878,
when another Englishman by the
name of Waller reported a new
gazelle from Somaliland. It was
a rather small animal as far as
the body went, but it had long
legs, almost like those of a giraffe,
and a fairly long neck. The scien-
tific name at first became Gazella
walleri, which was later changed
into Litocranius ("small skull")
walleri.

One year later, the zoological
world became even more excited
by a report from Russia. A Rus-
sian traveler, Nikolai Mikhailo-
vitch Przevalski, reported that he
had found a wild horse in Central
Asia. Not a wild ass, which were
known to exist in quite a num-
ber of places, not a feral horse
(this is the term used for the wild
offspring of animals), but actually
a wild horse which not only had

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

49

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■■■^■ ^■■■ ■■■^Miai

Mi

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ffef

m

lillll

: ^5?'

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1I1«H1II

Fig. 1: The Giant Panda
Courfesy: Amer. Museum
of Naf. History

i

never been domesticated but had largest of all living zebras, now
not even been known to exist. It known as Grevy's Zebra, or Doli-

was called Equus przevalski to the
chagrin of all zoologists outside
Russia, who have to learn to pro-
nounce it as Pshe-vall-skee, with
the accent on the vail.

Another wild horse entered the
zoological scene only a few years
later, in 1882. It was not really
meant to be a discovery; it was
intended as an international good-
will token. His Majesty, the Em-
peror Menelik of Ethiopia, gave it
as a present to the president of
the French republic, whose name
was Grevy. It turned out to be
an unknown species of zebra, the

chohippus grevyi.

In 1888, there came a shout of
surprise from Australia. The dis-
covery was physically small, but
important. Australia is the conti-
nent of the marsupials or pouched
mammals, but most of them were
large enough and numerous
enough to be quickly discovered.
However, one had stayed unno-
ticed underfoot — literally. It was
Notoryctes typhlops, the marsupial
mole. Strangely enough, its fur
is of a golden color of remarkable
beauty.

The ostrich is, as everybody

50

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

Fig. 2: The first picture of
Pere David's Deer, published
in France in 1866. The draw-
ing was probably by a
Chinese artist

had a red neck and red legs. More-
over, the lower half of the long
neck was covered with feathers,
though normally the whole neck
is nearly naked. It was a new spe-
cies and was named Massai Os-
trich, or Struthio massaicus.

knows, the largest living bird, oc-
curring normally in northern
Africa. Its scientific name is Stru-
thio camelus. In 1890, a German
living in East Africa sent a live
ostrich to the zoological garden
in Berlin, with a note explaining
that it had been caught on Massai
territory. After a while, the experts
felt that there was something
somehow wrong and soon they
put their finger on the "wrongness."
The African ostrich normally
has a red or reddish neck and legs.
That is the northern variety. The
so-called Somali ostrich has a blu-
ish-grey neck and legs. This one, name of the discoverer was Jef-
though not of the northern variety, fery.)

NE new bird seems to deserve
another, and four years later
a new and very large eaglelike
bird was reported from the Philip-
pines. It was said to eat mainly
monkeys, which accounts for the
scientific name of Pithecophaga
(monkey-eater) jefferyi. (The

FOR YOUR I NFORMATION

51

Fig. 3: Caenolestes obscvrus, a survivor from
the early days of the mammals

Drawing by Olga Ley

Hard on the heels of the news Lepidoteuthis grimaldii and none

of the monkey-eating bird came
a chance discovery, made by the
experts on board of the yacht of
the then Prince of Monaco. The
yacht was near the Azores, where
local fishermen had just harpooned
one of the toothed whales. The
animal was too large to be handled
by the fishing boats and the yacht
offered its services for towing it
ashore.

The whale was not quite dead
and suddenly vomited the contents
of its stomach, consisting mostly
of torn pieces of large octopi.
Among these pieces there was a
damaged specimen of a seven-foot
octopus that was completely un-
known to science. It was named

11

like it has been seen or caught
since.

I am trying to tell of these dis-
coveries in chronological order, but
there are some difficulties.

There is a small mammal in
Ecuador which measures 9Vfe
inches on the average, of which
4V2 inches are tail. It was first
mentioned by R. F. Tomes in
1860 and he wrote that this would
be a shrew if it did not have a ru-
dimentary pouch. The trouble was
that he had an immature specimen.
In 1895, another specimen, adult
this time, was found and described
by the English zoologist Oldfield
Thomas. It was a New World
marsupial, closely related to ex-

52

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

tinct forms from Patagonia, and
also related to other fossils which
Georges Cuvier had found near
Paris. Its name became Caeno-
lestes (Fig. 3) which translates as
"new robber," with reference to
the old robbers of Cuvier.

If Caenolestes failed to impress
the layman, the next discovery,
made in 1900, certainly did. It
was the Okapi, a short-necked rela-
tive of the giraffe which lives in
the Congo Forest. Henry Stanley
had heard of it some eight years
earlier; the natives talked about a
zebra in the forest. Zoologists
snorted, for zebras do not go into
the forest. By 1900, when pieces
of skin came to London, it seemed
that they had been wrong and that
this particular zebra did.

Two years later, skulls and com-
plete skins became available and
the zoologists were proved right

again— the animal was not a zebra
and is not even striped all overr
It had just happened that the
striped portions of a cut-up skin
had become known first.

The discovery of the Okapi
(Fig. 4) was no doubt the greatest
surprise since Father Armand Da-
vid's finds. And Africa kept sur-
prising zoologists.

First, in 1903, the Congo Giraffe
came to light. It is only a "race,"
not a species, but still one should
not think that a giraffe could have
been overlooked for so long. One
year later, a very large package
arrived in London from Captain
Meinertzhagen of His Majesty's
East African Rifles, stationed in
Kenya District. It contained an
imperfect large black pelt and a
perfect skull from another speci-
men. Quickly dubbed the Giant
Forest Hog, it was new to science

Fig. 4: The Okapi

Drawing by Olga Ley

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

53

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Fig. 5: The first picture of the Takahe, published in London in 1850

(though natives had told Stanley
about it) and merely the very
largest species of wild pig in
existence. Its scientific name be-
came Hylochoerus meinertzhageni.
A grown male measures six feet
in length.

In 1910, one more antelope was
discovered by Buxton in the

southernmost portion of Ethiopia.
It was named Nyala buxtoni.

URING the same year, a ru-
mor from the Far East was

■

confirmed. On the small island of
Komodo, situated between the
somewhat larger islands of Sum-
bawa and Flores, "dragons" had
been rumored to live. In a man-
ner of speaking, the rumor was
true — it was Varanus komodoen-

sis, the largest of the generally
large monitor lizards. The biggest
actually measured was 11 feet
8 inches long, but the natives said
that larger ones had occasionally

*

been taken away.

In the last year of the First
World War, another unknown
mammal was reported from China
for the first time, but because of
war and revolution, not much at-
tention was paid to it at the time.
It was a dolphin, but one living
in rivers. Its name became Lipotes
vexillifer and even now not much
is known about it.

There followed a comparatively
long pause of nineteen years, but
then the year 1937 brought two
discoveries, one from Asia and the
other from Africa.

54

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

44°S

1

BANKS
PENINSULA

SULA

STEWART ISLD.

I72°E

46°S.

I74°E

i

Fig. 6: The southern half of the South Island of New Zealand

The Asian discovery was nothing
less than a species of wild cattle,
the Kouprey (Bos sauveli), which
had somehow managed to live un-
noticed in Indochina; probably
often seen, sometimes shot, but
unrecognized as a scientific novelty.

The African discovery was a
bird and it was by no means a
chance discovery. One of the
"okapi expeditions" had brought,
among other things, a bundle of
bird feathers acquired from natives
of the Congo region by trade.

This bundle of feathers reached
New York in 1915 and Dr. James
P. Chapin of the American Mu-
seum of Natural History sorted
them out at leisure. He could de-

termine the

of all the

origin

feathers but one, a rather large one
which just would not fit any known
bird.

Years later, in 1936, Dr. Chapin
found in the Congo Museum in
Tervueren (near Brussels) in
Belgium two stuffed birds. They
were labeled "young peacocks,"
but actually they were unknowns.
However, they bore feathers like
the one that could not be classified.
Next year, Dr. Chapin shot the
bird in the Congo district. It was
the Congo peacock (Afropavo
congensis), which had been fa-
miliar to the natives under the
name of itundu.

The Congo peacock is not even
especially rare!

If the Congo peacock was dis-
covered by a systematic search, the
next discovery was pure chance.
It was the fish now known as
Latimeria, a very strange fish in-
deed, a so-called coelacanth which
was rather well known as a fossil.

FOR YOUR I NFORMATION

55

But everybody was convinced that
this type had become extinct some
50 million years ago. Then one
was caught by a fishing vessel off
the South African East Coast in
December 1938. It remained the
only one for many years and the
blame for the failure to find more
was squarely put on the Second

World War.

Now we know that the zoolo-
gists had looked in the wrong area.
The first Latimeria had been
caught off East London, which is a
considerable distance to the south
of Madagascar. For reasons not
known, it had strayed nearly 2000
miles from its home grounds,
which are the waters around the
Comores Islands between the Afri-
can coast and the northern tip of
Madagascar.

T^VEN around the Comores
■" Islands, this fish from the dis-
tant geological past is not frequent.
Still, it is frequent enough for the
islanders to have coined a special
name for it — conbessa. Since this
is French territory, the whole Lati-
meria case is in French hands,
which are indubitably capable but,
one suspects, a bit slow. When I
wrote a column on Latimeria in
Galaxy (May 1956), it was

stated that a four-volume mono-
graph on this fish was forthcoming.
It still is.

Though Latimeria might be said

of that century of new animals, it
is not the end of the story.

In 1950, the German zoologist
Dr. Ingo Krumbiegel identified a
new animal from its skin. It is a
mountain wolf living in the South
American Andes. Presumably the
people who shot it — one South
American dealer is said to have
had four skins at one time— thought
these were feral dogs. It has yet
to be taken alive.

And two birds were "re-dis-
covered," which is to say that they
were found to be still alive, even
though the books said they were
extinct. One was the Bermuda
Cahow, the other the large and
beautifully plumaged Takahe
(Notornis) of the South Island of
New Zealand (Fig. 5).

Originally the Takahe had lived
all over both the North and South
Islands of New Zealand, but that
was before white explorers, mis-
sionaries and settlers arrived. By
about 1800, though the North
Island form was extinct, the some-
what different South Island form
was known to be still alive.

As time went on, a few speci-
mens came to light, all from the
vicinity of Lake Te Anau, which
lies inland of the New Zealand
fjord area of the South Island
(Fig. 6). The "last" Takahe was
killed by a dog on August 7, 1898.
Fortunately the owner of the dog
saw at once what it was and saved

to be the most important discovery the specimen for a museum.

56

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

However, enough rumors about
bird footprints came out of the
area so that, in November 1948,
Dr. Geoffrey E. Orbell led a small
expedition to the mountains to
the west of Lake Te Anau". Sud-
denly they saw a Takahe. One
member of the expedition threw a
net to catch it and caught two.
They were tied up to be photo-
graphed and then released again.
Now the Takahe, like the Ber-
muda Cahow, is strongly protected
by law.

KNOW that I am now ex-
pected to go and make a few
predictions of what might still be
discovered. I will, but before I do
so, a quick look at some statistics
ought to be most instructive.

The first book that tried to sys-
tematize all living animals was the
Systema naturae of the Swedish
scientist Karl von Linne, better
known by the Latinized version of
his name: Carolus Linnaeus. The
tenth revised edition of his book
(published just 200 years ago, in
1758) is always taken to be the
edition of the Systema naturae and
listed 180 mammals, 450 birds,
400 fishes and, of the insects, 600
beetles, and not quite as many
different moths and butterflies.

In 1900, no less than 3500
mammals were known (this in-
cluded so-called geographical varia-
tions), 13,000 birds, 5000 reptiles
and amphibians, and about 30,000

fishes. Among the insects, they
counted in 1900 an almost even
100,000 Lepidoptera (moths and
butterflies), 30,000 Hemiptera
(leaf hoppers, bugs, etc.), 130,000
Coleoptera (beetles), 30,000 Dip-
tera (flies, etc.), 40,000 Hymenop-
tera (wasps, bees, et a/.), 13,000
Odonata (dragonflies) and so on
and so forth. There were 20,000
different spiders known, 8000
worms, 50,000 molluscs (snails,
etc.) and 3000 echinoderms like
starfish.

A few years before this count
was taken, the Prussian Academy
of Science, well supplied with
money at the moment, decided to
produce a modern equivalent of
the Systema naturae, reflecting the
zoological knowledge at the turn
of the century. They worked brave-
ly, producing 60 volumes of zoolo-
gy. Then they had to give up be-
cause one of their members, the
zoologist R. Hesse, calculated that
the completion of the work would
take 270 years— provided that no
new discoveries would be made
during that time!

As regards predictions, let's start
with the easiest place of all, the
oceans. We know that there are
unknown fish; they have been seen
through the window of the bathy-
sphere by William Beebe. They
haven't been taken yet, but they
will be.

The International Geophysical
Year is devoting much attention

FOR YOUR I NF0RMAT10N

57

to the oceans and to ocean currents
at various layers. They are not
specifically after the discovery of
new fishes, but it would be most
surprising if they did not get a
few.

Then, also in the oceans, there
is the problem of the Great Sea
Serpent (see my Galaxy columns
for December 1956 and January
1957), which might be a mam-
mal.

-

Thirdly, there seems to be a
hitherto undiscovered long-necked
and large marine turtle.

'TEARING the continents one by
■"- one, nothing specifically is ru-
mored from North America. South
America has many rumors emanat-
ing from it, but none specific
enough to start theorizing. For a
while, a kind of hunt was on for
surviving giant sloths, but that has
died down. Though South Ameri-
ca will probably provide a num-
ber of novelties in time, there is
no way of guessing what they
might be. Europe can also be very
nearly written off, except for a per-
sistent rumor about a fairly large
unknown lizardlike animal in the
Austrian Alps.

Africa is a different story. There
are rumors in quantity and they
might very well be true.

One is usually referred to as
"Nandi bear" (also as chimiset,
nunda and mngwa — don't ask me

which probably is not a bear but
a man-killing mammal, possibly
feline.

The other is a river- or lake-
dwelling killer of hippopotami,
referred to as the chipekwe, or
mokele-mbembe and, possibly, lau.
What can be learned always has
a few things in common— the un-
known animal lives in fresh water,
but can go on land. It kills hip-
popotami, but does not eat them.
It has a long neck. And somehow
the impression of a reptilian na-
ture is conveyed.

Passing on to Asia, the main
mystery and possible next dis-
covery is the yeti or "abominable
snowman" whom the Sherpas de-
scribe as being the same size they
are (average 5 ft. 6 in.) and cov-
ered with long-haired but very
thin fur of a brownish color. It
is possible that this is actually a
very primitive human race. Else-
where, primitive races have been
pushed by their less primitive
neighbors into environments that
the less primitive peoples did not
want themselves. This may well
have happened in Central Asia to
a primitive and somewhat peculiar-
looking human type.

In Australia, there is one un-
known animal that may be said
to be almost known. It has been
seen repeatedly in the northeast
part of Australia, the Cape York
Peninsula. It is rather matter-of-

how this should be pronounced), factly described as a "cat," as large

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

as a strong medium-sized dog, with
a head resembling that of a tiger.
It is described as striped, black

*

on gray, with sharp claws and
pointed ears. One witness saw it
kill a kangaroo.

The animal is obviously rare
and its habitat restricted to a com-
paratively small area. It could be
either a real "cat" from the de-
scription, a feline carnivore like a
large lynx. Or else, which would
be much more interesting if it
turned out to be the case, it could
be a marsupial carnivore like the
Tasrnanian Tiger.

New Zealand, finally, could har-
bor two more discoveries that
would not be complete novelties
because they have been rumored
for so long. One is the Wait or eke,

the only (but undiscovered) indi-
genous land mammal of New Zea-
land. I have told what is known
about it in my column in the Oc-
tober 1956 issue. The other, ru-
mored from the Dusky Sound area,
not too far from Takahe country,
is a small Moa, the type called
by scientists Megalapteryx. Like
the Takahe, this Megalapteryx was
known to the Maori and the most
recent Moa remains known are of
this type. Whether there are any
left is doubtful, but not impossible.
Well, that's the story. Like all
stories of discovery, it has no end,
properly speaking, because the end
consists of opening new vistas.

— WILLY LEY

STATEMENT REQUIRED BY THE ACT
OF AUGUST 24, 1912, AS AMENDED BY
THE ACTS OF MARCH 3, 1933, AND »
JULY 2, 1946 (Title 39, United States Code,
Section 233) SHOWING THE OWNER-
SHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULA-
TION OF Galaxy Science Fiction published
monthly at New York, N. Y. for Oct. 1, 1957.

1. The names and addresses of the pub-
lisher, editor, managing edtior, and business
managers are: Robert M. Guinn, 421 Hudson
Street (14), New York City; Editor, Horace
L. Gold, 421 Hudson Street (14) New York
City; Managing Editor, None; Business Edi-
tor, None.

2. The owner is: (If owned by a corpora-
tion, its name and address must be stated and
also immediately thereunder the names and
addresses of stockholders owning or holding 1
percent or more of total amount of stock. If
not owned by a corporation, the names and
addresses of the individual owners must be
given. If owned by a partnership or other un-
incorporated firm, its name and address, as.
well as that of each individual member, must
be given.) Galaxy Publishing Corp., 421 Hud-
son Street (14), New York City; Robert M.
Guinn (Sole Stockholder), 421 Hudson Street
(14), New York City.

3. The known bondholders, mortgaees, and
other security holders owning or holding 1
percent or more of total amount of bonds,
mortgages, or other securities are: (If there
are none, so state.) None.

4. Paragraphs 2 and 3 include, in cases
where the stockholder or security holder ap-
pears upon the books of the company as trus-
tee or in any other fiduciary relation, the
name of the person or corporation for whom
such trustee is acting; also the statements in
the two paragraphs show the affiant's full
knowledge and belief as to the circumstances
and conditions under which stockholders who
do not appear upon the books of the company
as trustees, hold stock and securities in a ca-
pacity other than that of a bone fide owner.

5. The average number of copies of each
issue of this publication sold or distributed,
through the mails or otherwise, to paid sub-
scribers during the 12 months preceding the
date shown above was: (This information is
required from daily, weekly, semi-weekly, and
triweekly newspapers only.)

/s/ ROBERT M. GUINN

Sworn to and subscribed before me this 26th
day of September, 1957.

[SEAL]

/s/ JOAN J. DeMARIO

Notary Public, State of New York

No. 24-5978800

Qualified in Kings County
Term Expires March 30, 1958

FOR YOUR I NFORMATION

59

By HARRY HARRISON

Being an interstellar trouble shooter wouldn't
be so bad ... if I could shoot the trouble!

HE Old Man had that look
of intense glee on his face
that meant someone was in
for a very rough time. Since we
were alone, it took no great feat
of intelligence to figure it would be
me. I talked first, bold attack being
the best defense and so forth.

"I quit. Don't bother telling me
what dirty job you have cooked
up, because I have already quit
and you do not want to reveal
company secrets to me."

The grin was even wider now
and he actually chortled as he
thumbed a button on his console.

A thick legal document slid out
of the delivery slot onto his desk.

"This is your contract," he said.
"It tells how and when you will
work. A steel-and-vanadium-bound
contract that you couldn't crack
with a molecular disruptor."

I leaned out quickly, grabbed it
and threw it into the air with a
single motion. Before it could fall,
I had my Solar out and, with a
wide-angle shot, burned the con-
tract to ashes.

The Old Man pressed the but-
ton again and another contract
slid out on his desk. If possible,

Illustrated by KRAMER

60

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

the smile was still wider now.

"I should have said a duplicate
of your contract — like this one
here." He made a quick note on
his secretary plate. "I have de-
ducted 13 credits from your salary
for the cost of the duplicate — as
well as a 100-credit fine for firing
a Solar inside a building."

I slumped, defeated, waiting for
the blow to land. The Old Man
fondled my contract.

"According to this document,
you can't quit. Ever. Therefore I
have a little job I know you'll
enjoy. Repair job. The Centauri
beacon has shut down. It's a Mark
III beacon . . ."

"What kind of beacon?" I asked
him. I have repaired hyperspace
beacons from one arm of the
Galaxy to the other and was sure
I had worked on every type or
model made. But I had never
heard of this kind.

"Mark III," the Old Man re-
peated, practically chortling. "I
never heard of it either until Rec-
ords dug up the specs. They found
them buried in the back of their
oldest warehouse. This was the
earliest type of beacon ever built
— by Earth, no less. Considering
its location on one of the Proxima
Centauri planets, it might very
well be the first beacon."

strosity! It looks more like a dis-
tillery than a beacon — must be at
least a few hundred meters high.
I'm a repairman, not an archeolo-
gist. This pile of junk is over 2000
years old. Just forget about it and
build a new one."

The Old Man leaned over his
desk, breathing into my face. "It
would take a year to install a new
beacon — besides being too expen-
sive — and this relic is on one of
the main routes. We have ships
making fifteen-light-year detours

77

now.

He leaned back, wiped his hands
on his handkerchief and gave me
Lecture Forty-four on Company
Duty and My Troubles.

"This department is officially
called Maintenance and Repair,
when it really should be called
trouble-shooting. Hyperspace bea-
cons are made to last forever —
or damn close to it. When one of
them breaks down, it is never an
accident, and repairing the thing
is never a matter of just plugging
in a new part."

He was telling me — the guy
who did the job while he sat back
on his fat paycheck in an air-
conditioned office.

He rambled on. "How I wish
that were all it took! I would have
a fleet of parts ships and junior
mechanics to install them. But it's
LOOKED at the blueprints he not like that at all. I have a fleet
handed me and felt my eyes of expensive ships that are
glaze with horror. "It's a mon- equipped to do almost anything —

THE REPAIRMAN

61

manned by a bunch of irrespon-
sibles like you"

I nodded moodily at his point-
ing finger.

"How I wish I could fire you
all! Combination space-jockeys,
mechanics, engineers, soldiers, con-
men and anything else it takes to
do the repairs. I have to browbeat,
bribe, blackmail and bulldoze you
thugs into doing a simple job. If
you think you're fed up, just think
how I feel. But the ships must go
through! The beacons must oper-
ate!"

I recognized this deathless line
as the curtain speech and crawled
to my feet. He threw the Mark III
file at me and went back to
scratching in his papers. Just as I
reached the door, he looked up
and impaled me on his finger again.

"And don't get any fancy ideas
about jumping your contract. We
can attach that bank account of
yours on Algol II long before you
could draw the money out."

I smiled, a little weakly, I'm
afraid, as if I had never meant to
keep that account a secret. His
spies were getting more efficient
every day. Walking down the hall,
I tried to figure a way to transfer
the money without his catching
on — and knew at the same time

he was figuring a way to outfigure
me.

It was all very depressing, so
I stopped for a drink, then went
on to the spaceport.

T> Y the time the ship was serv-
-*-* iced, I had a course charted.
The nearest beacon to the broken-
down Proxima Centauri Beacon
was on one of the planets of Beta
Circinus and I headed there first,
a short trip of only about nine days
in hyperspace.

To understand the importance
of the beacons, you have to under-
stand hyperspace. Not that many
people do, but it is easy enough to
understand that in this non-space
the regular rules don't apply. Speed
and measurements are a matter of
relationship, not constant facts like
the fixed universe.

The first ships to enter hyper-
space had no place to go — and
no way to even tell if they had
moved. The beacons solved that
problem and opened the entire uni-
verse. They are built on planets
and generate tremendous amounts
of power. This power is turned
into radiation that is punched
through into hyperspace. Every
beacon has a code signal as part
of its radiation and represents a
measurable point in hyperspace.
Triangulation and quadrature of
the beacons works for navigation
— only it follows its own rules. The
rules are complex and variable,
but they are still rules that a navi-
gator can follow.

For a hyperspace jump, you
need at least four beacons for an
accurate fix. For long jumps, navi-
gators use as many as seven or

62

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

■

eight. So every beacon is important no humaneness in this decision.

and every one has to keep operat-
ing. That is where I and the other
trouble-shooters came in.

We travel in well-stocked ships
that carry a little bit of everything;
only one man to a ship because
that is all it takes to operate the
overly efficient repair machinery.
Due to the very nature of our job,
we spend most of our time just
rocketing through normal space.
After all, when a beacon breaks
down, how do you find it?

Not through hyperspace. All you
can do is approach as close as you
can by using other beacons, then
finish the trip in normal space.
This can take months, and often
does.

This job didn't turn out to be

quite that bad. I zeroed on the
Beta Circinus beacon and ran a
complicated eight-point problem
through the navigator, using every
beacon I could get an accurate
fix on. The computer gave me a
course with an estimated point-of-
arrival as well as a built-in safety
factor I never could eliminate from
the machine.

I would much rather take a
chance of breaking through near
some star than spend time just
barreling through normal space,
but apparently Tech knows this,
too. They had a safety factor built
into the computer so you couldn't
end up inside a star no matter how
hard you tried. I'm sure there was

They just didn't want to lose the

t

ship.

TT was a twenty-hour jump, ship's
■*■ time, and I came through in the
middle of nowhere. The robot
analyzer chuckled to itself and
scanned all the stars, comparing
them to the spectra of Proxima
Centauri. It finally rang a bell and
blinked a light. I peeped through
the eyepiece.

A fast reading with the photocell
gave me the apparent magnitude
and a comparison with its absolute
magnitude showed its distance.
Not as bad as I had thought— a six-
week run, give or take a few days.
After feeding a course taps into
the robot pilot, I strapped into the
acceleration tank and went to
sleep.

The time went fast. I rebuilt
my camera for about the twentieth
time and just about finished a
correspondence course in nucleon-
ics. Most repairmen take these
courses. Besides their always
coming in handy, the company
grades your pay by the number of*
specialties you can handle. All this,
with some oil painting and free-fall
workouts in the gym, passed the
time. I was asleep when the alarm
went off that announced planetary
distance.

Planet two, where the beacon
was situated according to the old
charts, was a mushy-looking, wet

THE REPAIRMAN

63

64

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

kind of globe. I tried to make sense
out of the ancient directions and
finally located the right area. Stay-
ing outside the atmosphere, I sent
a flying eye down to look things
over. In this business, you learn
early when and where to risk your
own skin. The eye would be good
enough for the preliminary survey.
The old boys had enough brains
to choose a traceable site for the
beacon, equidistant on a line be-
tween two of the most prominent
mountain peaks. I located the peaks

easily enough and started the eye
out from the first peak and kept
it on a course directly toward the
second. There was a nose and tail
radar in the eye and I fed their
signals into a scope as an ampli-
tude curve. When the two peaks
coincided, I spun the eye controls
and dived the thing down.

I cut out the radar and cut in
the nose orthicon and sat back to
watch the beacon appear on the
screen.

The image blinked, focused —
and a great damn pyramid swam
into view. I cursed and wheeled
the eye in circles, scanning the
surrounding country. It was flat,
marshy bottom land without a
bump. The only thing in a ten-mile
circle was this pyramid — and
that definitely wasn't my beacon.

Or wasn't it?

I dived the eye lower. The
pyramid was a crude-looking thing
of undressed stone, without carv-

ings or decorations. There was a
shimmer of light from the top and
I took a closer look at it. On the
peak of the pyramid was a hollow
basin filled with water. When I

saw that, something clicked in my
mind.

OCKING the eye in a circular

*

course, I dug through the Mark
III plans — and there it was. The
beacon had a precipitating field
and a basin on top of it for water;
this was used to cool the reactor
that powered the monstrosity. If
the water was still there, the bea-
con was still there — inside the
pyramid. The natives, who, of
course, weren't even mentioned by
the idiots who constructed the
thing, had built a nice heavy, thick
stone pyramid around the beacon.

I took another look at the screen
and realized that I had locked the
eye into a circular orbit about
twenty feet above the pyramid.
The summit of the stone pile was
now covered with lizards of some
type, apparently the local life-form.
They had what looked like throw-
ing sticks and arbalasts and were
trying to shoot down the eye, a
cloud of arrows and rocks flying in
every direction.

I pulled the eye straight up and
away and threw in the control
circuit that would return it auto-
matically to the ship.

Then I went to the galley for a
long, strong drink. My beacon was

THE REPAIRMAN

65

not only locked inside a mountain

of handmade stone, but I had

managed to irritate the things who

had built the pyramid. A great be-
ginning for a job and one clearly

designed to drive a stronger man
than me to the bottle.

Normally, a repairman stays

away from native cultures. They
are poison. Anthropologists may
not mind being dissected for their
science, but a repairman wants to
make no sacrifices of any kind for
his job. For this reason, most
beacons are built on uninhabited
planets. If a beacon has to go on a
planet with a culture, it is usually
built in some inaccessible place.

Why this beacon had been built
within reach of the local claws,
I had yet to find out. But that
would come in time. The first
thing to do was make contact. To
make contact, you have to know
the local language.

And, for that, I had long before
worked out a system that was fool-
proof.

I had a pryeye of my own con-
struction. It looked like a piece of
rock about a foot long. Once on
the ground, it would never be no-
ticed, though it was a little
disconcerting to see it float by. I
located a lizard town about a thou-
sand kilometers from the pyramid
and dropped the eye. It swished
down and landed at night in the
bank of the local mud wallow.
This was a favorite spot that drew

a good crowd during the day. In
the morning, when the first wal-
lowers arrived, I flipped on the re-
corder.

After about five of the local
days, I had a sea of native con-
versation in the memory bank of
the machine translator and had
tagged a few expressions. This is
fairly easy to do when you have
a machine memory to work with.
One of the lizards gargled at an-
other one and the second one
turned around. I tagged this ex-
pression with the phrase, "Hey,
George!" and waited my chance
to use it. Later the same day, I
caught one of them alone and
shouted "Hey, George !" at him.
It gurgled out through the speaker
in the local tongue and he turned
around.

When you get enough reference
phrases like this in the memory
bank, the MT brain takes over and
starts filling in the missing pieces.
As soon as the MT could give a
running translation of any conver-
sation it heard, I figured it was
time to make a contact.

FOUND him easily enough.

He was the Centaurian version
of a goat-boy— he herded a par-
ticularly loathsome form of local
life in the swamps outside the
town. I had one of the working
eyes dig a cave in an outcropping
of rock and wait for him.

When he passed next day, I

66

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

whispered into the mike: "Wel-
come, O Goat-boy Grandson! This
is your grandfather's spirit speak-
ing from paradise." This fitted in
with what I could make out of the
local religion.

Goat-boy stopped as if he'd been
shot. Before he could move, I
pushed a switch and a handful of
the local currency, wampum-type
shells, rolled out of the cave and
landed at his feet.

*

"Here is some money from para-
dise, because you have been a
good boy." Not really from para-
dise—I had lifted it from the
treasury the night before. "Come
back tomorrow and we will talk
some more," I called after the flee-
ing figure. I was pleased to notice
that he took the cash before tak-
ing off.

After that, Grandpa in paradise
had many heart-to-heart talks with
Grandson, who found the heaven-
ly loot more than he could resist.
Grandpa had been out of touch
with things since his death and
Goat-boy happily filled him in.

I learned all I needed to know
of the history, past and recent, and
it wasn't nice.

In addition to the pyramid be-
ing around the beacon, there was
a nice little religious war going on
around the pyramid.

It all began with the land bridge.
Apparently the local lizards had
been living in the swamps when
the beacon was built, but the build-

ers didn't think much of them.
They were a low type and coil-
fined to a distant continent. The
idea that the race would develop
and might reach this continent
never occurred to the beacon
mechanics. Which is, of course,
what happened.

A little geological turnover, a
swampy land bridge formed in the
right spot, and the lizards began
to wander up beacon valley. And
found religion. A shiny metal

temple out of which poured a
constant stream of magic water—
the reactor-cooling water pumped
down from the atmosphere con-
denser on the roof. The radioactiv-
ity in the water didn't hurt the
natives. It caused mutations that
bred true.

A city was built around the
temple and, through the centuries,

the pyramid was put up around
the beacon. A special branch of
the priesthood served the temple.
All went well until one of the
priests violated the temple and
destroyed the holy waters. There
had been revolt, strife, murder and
destruction since then. But still
the holy waters would not flow.
Now armed mobs fought around
the temple each day and a new
band of priests guarded the sacred
fount.

And I had to walk into the
middle of that mess and repair the
thing.

It would have been easy enough

THE REPAIRMAN

67

if we were allowed a little may-
hem. I could have had a lizard fry,
fixed the beacon and taken off.
Only "native life-forms" were quite
well protected. There were spy
cells on my ship, all of which I
hadn't found, that would cheerful-
ly rat on me when I got back.

Diplomacy was called for. I
sighed and dragged out the plasti-
flesh equipment.

WfORKING from 3D snaps of
™ Grandson, I modeled a pass-
able reptile head over my own
features. It was a little short in
the jaw, me not having one of
their toothy mandibles, but that
was all right. I didn't have to look
exactly like them, just something
close, to soothe the native mind.
It's logical. If I were an ignorant
aborigine of Earth and I ran into
a Spican, who looks like a two-
foot gob of dried shellac, I would
immediately leave the scene. How-
ever, if the Spican was wearing a
suit of plastiflesh that looked re-
motely humanoid, I would at least
stay and talk to him. This was
what I was aiming to do with the
Centaurians.

When the head was done, I
peeled it off and attached it to an
attractive suit of green plastic,
complete with tail. I was really
glad they had tails. The lizards
didn't wear clothes and I wanted
to take along a lot of electronic
equipment. I built the tail over a

metal frame that anchored around
my waist. Then I filled the frame
with all the equipment I would
need and began to wire the suit.

When it was done, I tried it on
in front of a full-length mirror. It
was horrible but effective. The tail
dragged me down in the rear and
gave me a duck-waddle, but that
only helped the resemblance.

That night I took the ship down
into the hills nearest the pyramid,
an out-of-the-way dry spot where
the amphibious natives would
never go. A little before dawn, the
eye hooked onto my shoulders and
we sailed straight up. We hovered
above the temple at about 2,000
meters, until it was light, then
dropped straight down.

It must have been a grand sight.
The eye was camouflaged to look
like a flying lizard, sort of a card-
board pterodactyl, and the slowly
flapping wings obviously had
nothing to do with our flight. But
it was impressive enough for the
natives. The first one that spotted
me screamed and dropped over on
his back. The others came run-
ning. They milled and mobbed
and piled on top of one another,
and by that time I had landed
in the plaza fronting the temple.
The priesthood arrived.

I folded my arms in a regal
stance. "Greetings, O noble serv-
ers of the Great God," I said. Of
course I didn't say it out loud,
just whispered loud enough for

68

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

the throat mike to catch. This I wasn't stopped, so it looked all
was radioed back to the MT and right. The temple was a single
the translation shot back to a
speaker in my jaws.

The natives chomped and
rattled and the translation rolled

out almost instantly. I had the vol-
ume turned up and the whole
square echoed.

Some of the more credulous na-
tives prostrated themselves and
others fled screaming. One doubt-
ful type raised a spear, but no one
else tried that after the pterodac-
tyl-eye picked him up and
dropped him in the swamp. The
priests were a hard-headed lot
and weren't buying any lizards in
a poke; they just stood and mut-
tered. I had to take the offensive
again.

"Begone, O faithful steed," I
said to the eye, and pressed the
control in my palm at the same
time.

It took off straight up a bit
faster than I wanted; little pieces
of wind-torn plastic rained down.
While the crowd was ogling this
ascent, I walked through the
temple doors.

"I would talk with you, O noble
priests," I said.

Before they could think up a
good answer, I was inside.

HP HE temple was a small one
•*• built against the base of the
pyramid. I hoped I wasn't break-
ing too many taboos by going in.

room with a murky-looking pool
at one end. Sloshing in the pool
was an ancient reptile who clear-
ly was one of the leaders. I wad-
dled toward him and he gave me
a cold and fishy eye, then growled
something.

The MT whispered into my ear,
"Just what in the name of the
thirteenth sin are you and what
are you doing here?"

I drew up my scaly figure in a
noble gesture and pointed toward
the ceiling. "I come from your an-
cestors to help you. I am here to
restore the Holy Waters."

This raised a buzz of conversa-
tion behind me, but got no rise
out of the chief. He sank slowly
into the water until only his eyes
were showing. I could almost hear
the wheels turning behind that
moss-covered forehead. Then he
lunged up and pointed a dripping
finger at me.

"You are a liar! You are no an-
cestor of ours! We will—"

"Stop!" I thundered before he
got so far in that he couldn't back
out. "I said your ancestors sent me
as emissary— I am not one of your
ancestors. Do not try to harm me
or the wrath of those who have
Passed On will turn against you."

When I said this, I turned to
jab a claw at the other priests,
using the motion to cover my flick-
ing a coin grenade toward them.

THE REPAIRMAN

69

It blew a nice hole in the floor just drawing a bead on my right

with a great show of noise and
smoke.

The First Lizard knew I was
talking sense then and immediate-
ly called a meeting of the shamans.
It, of course, took place in the
public bathtub and I had to join
them there. We jawed and gur-
gled for about an hour and settled
all the major points.

I found out that they were new
priests; the previous ones had all
been boiled for letting the Holy
Waters cease. They found out I
was there only to help them restore
the flow of the waters. They
bought this, tentatively, and we all
heaved out of the tub and trickled
muddy paths across the floor.
There was a bolted and guarded
door that led into the pyramid
proper. While it was being opened,
the First Lizard turned to me.

"Undoubtedly you know of the
rule," he said. "Because the old
priests did pry and peer, it was
ruled henceforth that only the
blind could enter the Holy of
Holies." I'd swear he was smiling,
if thirty teeth peeking out of what
looked like a crack in an old suit-
case can be called smiling.

He was also signaling to him an
underpriest who carried a brazier
of charcoal complete with red-hot
irons. All I could do was stand
and watch as he stirred up the
coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron
and turned toward me. He was

eyeball when my brain got back
in gear.

"Of course," I said, "blinding is
only right. But in my case you
will have to blind me before I
leave the Holy of Holies, not now.
I need my eyes to see and mend
the Fount of Holy Waters. Once
the waters flow again, I will laugh
as I hurl myself on the burning

iron.

V

H

E took a good thirty seconds
to think it over and had to
agree with me. The local torturer
sniffled a bit and threw a little
more charcoal on the fire. The gate
crashed open and I stalked
through; then it banged to behind
me and I was alone in the dark.
But not for long— there was a
shuffling nearby and I took a
chance and turned on my flash.
Three priests were groping toward
me, their eye-sockets red pits of
burned flesh. They knew what I
wanted and led the way without

a word.

A crumbling and cracked stone

stairway brought us up to a solid
metal doorway labeled in archaic
script MARK III BEACON -
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL
ONLY. The trusting builders
counted on the sign to do the
whole job, for there wasn't a trace
of a lock on the door. One lizard
merely turned the handle and we
were inside the beacon.

70

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

I unzipped the front of my
camouflage suit and pulled out
the blueprints. With the faithful
priests stumbling after me, I lo-
cated the control room and turned
on the lights. There was a residue
of charge in the emergency bat-
teries, just enough to give a dim

light. The meters and indicators
looked to be in good shape; if
anything, unexpectedly bright
from constant polishing.

I checked the readings carefully
and found just what I had sus-
pected. One of the eager lizards
had managed to open a circuit box
and had polished the switches in-
side. While doing this, he had
thrown one of the switches and
that had caused the trouble.

"D ATHER, that had started the
-*-*- trouble. It wasn't going to be
ended by just reversing the water-
valve switch. This valve was sup-
posed to be used only for repairs,
after the pile was damped. When
the water was cut off with the pile
in operation, it had started to over-
heat and the automatic safeties

i

had dumped the charge down the
pit.

I could start the water again
easily enough, but there was no
fuel left in the reactor.

I wasn't going to play with the
fuel problem at all. It would be
far easier to install a new power
plant. I had one in the ship that
was about a tenth the size of the

ancient bucket of bolts and pro-
duced at least four times the
power. Before I sent for it, I
checked over the rest of the
beacon. In 2000 years, there
should be some sign of wear.

The old boys had built well,
I'll give them credit for that. Nine-
ty per cent of the machinery had
no moving parts and had suffered
no wear whatever. Other parts
they had beefed up, figuring they
would wear, but slowly. The
water-feed pipe from the roof, for
example. The pipe walls were at
least three meters thick— and the
pipe opening itself no bigger than
my head. There were some things
I could do, though, and I made a
list of parts.

The parts, the new power plant

and a few other odds and ends

were chuted into a neat pile on

the ship. I checked all the parts

by screen before they were loaded

in a metal crate. In the darkest

hour before dawn, the heavy-duty

eye dropped the crate outside the

temple and darted away without
being seen.

I watched the priests through

the pryeye while they tried to

*

open it. When they had given up,
I boomed orders at them through
a speaker in the crate. They spent
most of the day sweating the
heavy box up through the narrow
temple stairs and I enjoyed a
good sleep. It was resting inside
the beacon door when I woke up.

THE REPAIRMAN

71

HP HE repairs didn't take long,

•*• though there was plenty of

groaning from the blind lizards

when they heard me ripping the

wall open to get at the power
leads. I even hooked a gadget to
the water pipe so their Holy
Waters would have the usual re-
freshing radioactivity when they
started flowing again. The moment
this was all finished, I did the job
they were waiting for.

*

I threw the switch that started
the water flowing again.

There were a few minutes while
the water began to gurgle down
through the dry pipe. Then a roar
came from outside the pyramid
that must have shaken its stone
walls. Shaking my hands once over
my head, I went down for the
eye-burning ceremony.

The blind lizards were waiting
for me by the door and looked
even unhappier than usual. When
I tried the door, I found out why
—it was bolted and barred from
the other side.

"It has been decided," a lizard
said, "that you shall remain here
forever and tend the Holy Waters.
We will stay with you and serve
your every need."

A delightful prospect, eternity
spent in a locked beacon with
three blind lizards. In spite of their
hospitality, I couldn't accept.

"What— you dare interfere with
the messenger of your ancestors!"
I had the speaker on full volume

and the vibration almost shook my
head off.

The lizards cringed and I set
my Solar for a narrow beam and
ran it around the door jamb. There
was a great crunching and bang-
ing from the junk piled against it,
and then the door swung free. I
threw it open. Before they could
protest, I had pushed the priests
out through it.

The rest of their clan showed up
at the foot of the stairs and made
a great ruckus while I finished
welding the door shut. Running
through the crowd, I faced up to
the First Lizard in his tub. He
sank slowly beneath the surface.

"What lack of courtesy!" I
shouted. He made little bubbles
in the water. "The ancestors are
annoyed and have decided to for-
bid entrance to the Inner Temple
forever; though, out of kindness,
they will let the waters flow. Now
I must return— on with the cere-
mony!"

The torture-master was too
frightened to move, so I grabbed
out his hot iron. A touch on the
side of my face dropped a steel
plate over my eyes, under the plas-
tiskin. Then I jammed the iron
hard into my phony eye-sockets
and the plastic gave off an au-
thentic odor.

A cry went up from the crowd
as I dropped the iron and stag-
gered in blind circles. I must admit
it went off pretty welt

72

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

|>EFORE they could get any
-■-* more bright ideas, I threw the
switch and my plastic pterodactyl
sailed in through the door. I
couldn't see it, of course, but I
knew it had arrived when the
grapples in the claws latched onto
the steel plates on my shoulders.

I had got turned around after
the eye-burning and my flying
beast hooked onto me backward.
I had meant to sail out bravely,
blind eyes facing into the sunset;
instead, I faced the crowd as I
soared away, so I made the most
of a bad situation and threw them
a snappy military salute. Then I
was out in the fresh air and away.

When I lifted the plate and
poked holes in the seared plas-
tic, I could see the pyramid grow-
ing smaller behind me, water
gushing out of the base and a hap-
py crowd of reptiles sporting in
its radioactive rush. I counted off

on my talons to see if I had for-
gotten anything.

*

One: The beacon was repaired.

Two: The door was sealed, so
there should be no more sabotage,
accidental or deliberate.

Three: The priests should be
satisfied. The water was running
again, my eyes had been duly
burned out, and they were back
in business. Which added up to—

Four: The fact that they would
probably let another repairman
in, under the same conditions, if
the beacon conked out again. At
least I had done nothing, like
butchering a few of them, that
would make them antagonistic
toward future ancestral messen-
gers.

I stripped off my tattered lizard
suit back in the ship, very glad
that it would be some other re-
pairman who'd get the job.

HARRY HARRISON

The Great News Next Month . . .

THE BIG TIME
by Fritz Leiber

More immense in scope than cosmos and history, here is
the inside story of the war you aren't allowed to know
is going on . . . the vast struggle over your live and dead
body! Beginning in the next issue, in two thought-incit-
ing, pulse-pounding installments, written by one of
science fiction's greats, The Big Time is the big event of
1958. Don't miss it!

I

THE REPAIRMAN

73

Overhead

By FRITZ LEIBER

The Staff of Life suddenly and

disconcertingly sprouted wings

— and mankind had to eat crow!

Illustrated by WOOD

AS a blister ingly hot but
guaranteed weather-con-
trolled future summer day
dawned on the Mississippi Valley,
the walking mills of Puffy Prod-
ucts ("Spike to Loaf in One
Operation!") began to tread deli-
cately on their centipede legs
across the wheat fields of Kansas.

The walking mills resembled fat
metal serpents, rather larger than
those Chinese paper dragons ani-
mated by files of men in proces-
sion. Sensory robot devices in
their noses informed them that
the waiting wheat had reached ripe
perfection.

As they advanced, their heads

swung lazily from side to side, very

much like snakes, gobbling the yel-
low grain. In their throats, it was
threshed, the chaff bundled and
burped aside for pickup by the
crawl trucks of a chemical cor-
poration, the kernels quick-dried
and blown along into the mighty
chests of the machines. There the
tireless mills ground the kernels
to flour, which was instantly sifted,
the bran being packaged and
dropped like the chaff for pickup.
A cluster of tanks which gave
the metal serpents a decidedly
humpbacked appearance added
water, shortening, salt and other
ingredients, some named and some

74

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

:,:W"ii

, ,.,■ ,, ; . :

■ ; : ...::,:,■ : : --r

. ■■■■ - : ":. " :■;■ :

:;S:i:::::,:3!:

MBHtfNMM!

mmmmmm

.-::fft¥l t A'Sfe: : J : 1 --v: r

BREAD OVERHEAD

75

not. The dough was at the same
time infused with gas from a tank
conspicuously labeled "Carbon

*

Dioxide" ("No Yeast Creatures

in Your Bread!*).

Thus instantly risen, the dough
was clipped into loaves and shot
into radionic ovens forming the
midsections of the metal serpents.
There the bread was baked in a
matter of seconds, a fierce heat-
front browning the crusts, and the

rising more sluggishly than its fel-
lows, was snagged by a thrusting
claw. The machine paused, clum-
sily wiped off the injured loaf, set
it aside— where it bobbed on one
' corner, unable to take off again—
and went back to the work of
storing nothingness.

A flock of crows rose from the
trees of a nearby shelterbelt as the
flight of loaves approached. The
crows swooped to investigate and

piping-hot loaves sealed in trans- then suddenly scattered, screech-

parent plastic bearing the proud
Puffy loaf emblem (two cherubs
circling a floating loaf) and ejected
onto the delivery platform at each

serpent's rear end, where a clus-
ter of pickup machines, like hun-
gry piglets, snatched at the loaves
with hygienic claws.

A few loaves would be hur-
ried off for the day's consumption,
the majority stored for winter in
strategically located mammoth
deep freezes.

But now, behold a wonder! As
loaves began to appear on the
delivery platform of the first walk-
ing mill to get into action, they
did not linger on the conveyor
belt, but rose gently into the air
and slowly traveled off down-
wind across the hot rippling fields.

TPHE robot claws of the pickup
-*• machines clutched in vain, and,
not noticing the difference, pro-
ceeded carefully to stack empti-
ness, tier by tier. One errant loaf,

mg in panic.

The helicopter of a hangoverish
Sunday traveler bound for Wichita

shied very similarly from the
brown fliers and did not return for

a second look.

A black-haired housewife spied

them over her back fence, crossed
herself and grabbed her walkie-
talkie from, the laundry basket.
Seconds later, the yawning corres-
pondent of a regional newspaper
was jotting down the lead of a hu-
morous news story which, recalling
the old flying-saucer scares, stated
that now apparently bread was to
be included in the mad aerial tea
party.

The congregation of an open-
walled country church, standing
up to recite the most familiar of
Christian prayers, had just reached
the petition for daily sustenance,
when a sub-flight of the loaves,
either forced down by a vagrant
wind or lacking the natural buoy-
ancy of the rest, came coasting si-

76

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

lently as the sunbeams between the
graceful pillars at the altar end of
the building.

Meanwhile, the main flight, now
augmented by other bread flocks
from scores and hundreds of walk-
ing mills that had started work a
little later, mounted slowly and
majestically into the cirrus-
flecked upper air, where a steady
wind was blowing strongly toward
the east.

About one thousand miles farther
on in that direction, where a cluster
of stratosphere - tickling towers
marked the location of the metrop-
olis of NewNew York, a tender
scene was being enacted in the
pressurized penthouse managerial
suite of Puffy Products. Megera
Winterly, Secretary in Chief to the
Managerial Board and referred to
by her underlings as the Blonde
Icicle, was dealing with the ad-
vances of Roger ("Racehorse")
Snedden, Assistant Secretary to the
Board and often indistinguishable
from any passing office boy.

"Why don't you jump out the
window, Roger, remembering to
shut the airlock after you?" the
Golden Glacier said in tones not
unkind. "When are your high-
strung, thoroughbred nerves going
to accept the fact that I would
never consider marriage with a
business inferior? You have about
as much chance as a starving
Ukrainian kulak now that Mos-
cow's clapped on the interdict."

OGER'S voice was calm, al-
though his eyes were fever-*

ishly bright, as he replied, "A lot
of things are going to be different
around here, Meg, as soon as the
Board is forced to admit that only
my quick thinking made it possible
to bring the name of Puffyloaf in
front of the whole world."

"Puffyloaf could do with a little
of that," the business girl observed
judiciously. "The way sales have
been plummeting, it won't be long
before the Government deeds our
desks to the managers of Fairy
Bread and asks us to take the Big
Jump. But just where does your
quick thinking come into this, Mr.
Snedden? You can't be referring to
the helium — that was Rose Think-
er's brainwave."

She studied him suspiciously.
"You've birthed another promo-
tional bumble, Roger. I can see it
in your eyes. I only hope it's not
as big a one as when you put the
Martian ambassador on 3D and he
thanked you profusely for the gross
of Puffyloaves, assuring you that
he'd never slept on a softer mat-
tress in all his life on two planets."

"Listen to me, Meg. Today —
yes, today! — you're going to see
the Board eating out of my hand."

"Hah! I guarantee you won't
have any fingers left. You're bold

i

enough now, but when Mr. Gryce
and those two big machines come

through that door — "

"Now wait a minute, Meg — "

BREAD OVERHEAD

77

"Hush! They're coming now!"

Roger leaped three feet in the
air, but managed to land without a
sound and edged toward his stool.
Through the dilating iris of the
door strode Phineas T. Gryce,
flanked by Rose Thinker and Tin
Philosopher.

The man approached the confer-
ence table in the center of the room
with measured pace and gravely
expressionless face. The rose-tinted
machine on his left did a couple
of impulsive pirouettes on the way
and twittered a greeting to Meg
and Roger. The other machine qui-
etly took the third of the high seats
and lifted a claw at Meg, who now
occupied a stool twice the height of
Roger's.

"Miss Winterly, please — our
theme."

The Blonde Icicle's face thawed
into a little-girl smile as she chanted
bubblingly :

"Made up of tiny wheaten motes
And reinforced with sturdy
oats,

It rises through the air and

floats —
The bread on which all Terra
dotes!"

6 <• HP HANK YOU, Miss Winter-
■■* ly," said Tin Philosopher.
"Though a purely figurative state-
ment, that bit about rising through
the air always gets me — here." He
rapped his midsection, which gave
off a high musical clang.

"Ladies — " he inclined his photo-
cells toward Rose Thinker and Meg
—"and gentlemen. This is a historic
occasion in Old Puffy's long history,
the inauguration of the helium-filled
loaf ('So Light It Almost Floats
Away!') in which that inert and
heaven-aspiring gas replaces old-
fashioned carbon dioxide. Later,
there will be kudos for Rose
Thinker, whose bright relays genius-
sparked the idea, and also for Roger
Snedden, who took care of the

details.

"By the by, Racehorse, that was
a brilliant piece of work getting the
helium out of the government —
they've been pretty stuffy lately
about their monopoly. But first I
want to throw wide the casement in
your minds that opens on the Long
View of Things."

Rose Thinker spun twice on her
chair and opened her photocells
wide. Tin Philosopher coughed to
limber up the diaphragm of his
speaker and continued:

"Ever since the first cave wife

*

boasted to her next-den neighbor
about the superior paleness and fluf-
finess of her tortillas, mankind has
sought lighter, whiter bread. Indeed,
thinkers wiser than myself have
equated the whole upward course of
culture with this poignant quest.
Yeast was a wonderful discovery —
for its primitive day. Sifting the
bran and wheat germ from the flour
was an even more important ad-
vance. Early bleaching and preserv-

78

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTIO

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B8»«BWwi^»a^^ ; : ;:: : .

BREAD OVERHEAD

79

ing chemicals played their humble
parts.

"For a while, barbarous faddists
— blind to the deeply spiritual na-
ture of bread, which is recognized
by all great religions — held back
our march toward perfection with
their hair-splitting insistence on the
vitamin content of the wheat germ,
but their case collapsed when taste-
less colorless substitutes were
triumphantly synthesized and intro-
duced into the loaf, which for flaw-
less purity, unequaled airiness and
sheer intangible goodness was rap-
idly becoming mankind's supreme
gustatory experience."

"I wonder what the stuff tastes
like," Rose Thinker said out of a
clear sky.

"I wonder what taste tastes like,"
Tin Philosopher echoed dreamily.
Recovering himself, he continued :

"Then, early in the twenty-first
century, came the epochal re-
searches of Everett Whitehead,
Puffyloaf chemist, culminating in
his paper 'The Structural Bubble
in Cereal Masses' and making pos-
sible the baking of airtight bread
twenty times stronger (for its
weight) than steel and of a
lightness that would have been
incredible even to the advanced
chemist-bakers of the twentieth
century — a lightness so great that,
besides forming the backbone of
our own promotion, it has forever
since been capitalized on by our
conscienceless competitors of Fairy

Bread with their enduring slogan:
It Makes Ghost Toast'."

"That's a beaut, all right, that
ecto-dough blurb," Rose Thinker
admitted, bugging her photocells
sadly. "Wait a sec. How about? —

"There'll be bread

Overhead

When yotfre dead —

It is said"

HINEAS T. GRYCE wrinkled
his nostrils at the pink machine
as if he smelled her insulation
smoldering. He said mildly, "A
somewhat unhappy jingle, Rose,
referring as it does to the end of
the customer as consumer. More-
over, we shouldn't overplay the
figurative 'rises through the air'
angle. What inspired you?"

She shrugged. "I don't know —
oh, yes, I do. I was remembering
one of the workers' songs we ma-
chines used to chant during the Big
Strike —

"Work and pray,
Live on hay.
You'll get pie
In the sky
When you die —
Ifs a lie!
"I don't know why we chanted
it," she added. "We didn't want pie
— or hay, for that matter. And

machines don't pray, except Ti-
betan prayer wheels."

Phineas T. Gryce shook his head.
"Labor relations are another topic
we should stay far away from.

80

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

However, dear Rose, I'm glad you
keep trying to out j ingle those dirty
crooks at Fairy Bread." He scowled,
turning back his attention to Tin
Philosopher. "I get whopping mad,
Old Machine, whenever I hear that
other slogan of theirs, the discrim-
inatory one — 'Untouched by Robot
Claws/ Just because they employ a
few filthy androids in their fac-
tories!"

Tin Philosopher lifted one of his
own sets of bright talons. "Thanks,
P.T. But to continue my historical
resume, the next great advance in
the baking art was the substitution
of purified carbon dioxide, recov-
ered from coal smoke, for the gas
generated by yeast organisms in-
dwelling in the dough and later
killed by the heat of baking, their
corpses remaining in situ. But even
purified carbon dioxide is itself a
rather repugnant gas, a product of
metabolism whether fast or slow,
and forever associated with those
life processes which are obnoxious
to the fastidious."

Here the machine shuddered
with delicate clinkings. "Therefore,
we of Puffyloaf are taking today
what may be the ultimate step
toward purity : we are aerating our
loaves with the noble gas helium,
an element which remains virginal
in the face of all chemical tempta-
tions and whose slim molecules are
eleven times lighter than obese
carbon dioxide — yes, noble uncon-
taminable helium, which, if it be a

kind of ash, is yet the ash only of
radioactive burning, accomplished
or initiated entirely on the Sun, a
safe 93 million miles from this
planet. Let's have a cheer for the
helium loaf!"

TfTlTHOUT changing expres-

™ sion, Phineas T. Gryce rapped

the table thrice in solemn applause,

while the others bowed their heads.

"Thanks, T.P.," P.T. then said.
"And now for the Moment of
Truth. Miss Winterly, how is the
helium loaf selling?"

The business girl clapped on a
pair of earphones and whispered
into a lapel mike. Her gaze grew
abstracted as she mentally trans-
lated flurries of brief squawks into
coherent messages. Suddenly a sin-
gle vertical furrow creased her
matchlessly smooth brow.

"It isn't, Mr. Gryce!" she gasped
in horror. "Fairy Bread is outsell-
ing Puffyloaves by an infinity fac-
tor. So far this morning, there has
not been one single delivery of
Puffyloaves to any sales spot! Com-
plaints about non-delivery are pour-
ing in from both walking stores and
sessile shops."

"Mr. Snedden!" Gryce barked.
"What bug in the new helium
process might account for this
delay?"

Roger was on his feet, looking
bewildered. "I can't imagine, sir,
unless — just possibly — there's
been some unforeseeable difficulty

BREAD OVERHEAD

81

involving the new metal-foil wrap-
pers."

"Metal-foil wrappers? Were you
responsible for those?"

"Yes, sir. Last-minute recalcula-
tions showed that the extra light-
ness of the new loaf might be great
enough to cause drift during stack-
age. Drafts in stores might topple
sales pyramids. Metal-foil wrap-
pers, by their added weight, took
care of the difficulty ."

"And you ordered them without
consulting the Board?"

"Yes, sir. There was hardly time
and -"

"Why, you fool! I noticed that
order for metal-foil wrappers, as-
sumed it was some sub-secretary's
mistake, and canceled it last night!"

Roger Snedden turned pale.
"You canceled it?" he quavered.
"And told them to go back to the
lighter plastic wrappers?"

"Of course! Just what is behind
all this, Mr. Snedden? What recal-
culations were you trusting, when
our physicists had demonstrated
months ago that the helium loaf
was safely stackable in light airs
and gentle breezes — winds up to
Beaufort's scale 3. Why should a
change from heavier to lighter
wrappers result in complete non-
delivery?"

TJ OGER Snedden's paleness be-
-*-*- came tinged with an interest-
ing green. He cleared his throat
and made strange gulping noises.

Tin Philosopher's photocells fo-
cused on him calmly, Rose
Thinker's with unfeigned excite-
ment. P. T. Gryce's frown grew
blacker by the moment, while
Megera Winterly's Venus-mask
showed an odd dawning of dismay
and awe* She was getting new
squawks in her earphones.

"Er . . . ah . . . er . . ." Roger
said in winning tones. "Well, you
see, the fact is that I . . ."

"Hold it," Meg interrupted
crisply. "Triple-urgent from Public
Relations, Safety Division. Tulsa-
Topeka aero-express makes emer-
gency landing after being buffeted
in encounter with vast flight of
objects first described as brown
birds, although no failures reported
in airway's electronic anti-bird
fences. After grounding safely near
Emporia — no fatalities — pilot's
windshield found thinly plastered
with soft white-and-brown material.

Emblems on plastic wrappers em-
bedded in material identify it in-
controvertibly as an undetermined
number of Puffyloaves cruising at
three thousand feet!"

Eyes and photocells turned in-
quisitorially upon Roger Snedden.
He went from green to Puffyloaf
white and blurted : "All right, I did
it, but it was the only way out!
Yesterday morning, due to the
Ukrainian crisis, the government
stopped sales and deliveries of all
strategic stockpiled materials, in-
cluding helium gas. Puffy's new

82

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

program of advertising and promo-
tion, based on the lighter loaf, was
already rolling. There was only one
thing to do, there being only one
other gas comparable in lightness
to helium. I diverted the necessary

*

quantity of hydrogen gas from the
Hydrogenated Oils Section of our
Magna-Margarine Division and
substituted it for the helium."
"You substituted . . . hydrogen
for the . . . helium?" Phineas

• *

T. Gryce faltered in low mechani-
cal tones, taking four steps back-
ward.

"Hydrogen is twice as light . as
helium," Tin Philosopher remarked
judiciously.

"And many times cheaper — did
you know that?" Roger countered
feebly. "Yes, I substituted hydro-
gen. The metal-foil wrapping would
have added just enough weight to

counteract the greater buoyancy of

the hydrogen loaf. But—"

"So, when this morning's loaves

began to arrive on the delivery

platforms of the walking mills . . ."

Tin Philosopher left the remark

unfinished.

"Exactly," Roger agreed dis-
mally.

"Let me ask you, Mr. Snedden,"
Gryce interjected, still in low tones,
"if you expected people to jump to
the kitchen ceiling for their Puffy-
bread after taking off the metal
wrapper, or reach for the sky if
they happened to unwrap the stuff
outdoors?"

"Mr. Gryce," Roger said re-
proachfully, "you have often as-
sured me that what people do with
Puffybread after they buy it is no
concern of ours."

"I seem to recall," Rose Thinker
chirped somewhat unkindly, "that
dictum was created to answer in-
quiries after Roger put the famous
sculptures-in-miniature artist on 3D
and he testified that he always
molded his first attempts from
Puffybread, one jumbo loaf squeez-
ing down to approximately the size
of a peanut."

XJF ER photocells dimmed and
-*"*- brightened. "Oh, boy — hydro-
gen! The loaf's unwrapped. After
a while, in spite of the crust-seal, a
little oxygen diffuses in. An explo-
sive mixture. Housewife in curlers
and kimono pops a couple slices in
the toaster. Boom!"

The three human beings in the
room winced.

Tin Philosopher kicked her un-
der the table, while observing, "So
you see, Roger, that the non-deliv-
ery of the hydrogen loaf carries
some consolations. And I must con-
fess that one aspect of the affair
gives me great satisfaction, not as a
Board Member but as a private
machine. You have at last made a
reality of the 'rises through the air'
part of Puffybread's theme. They
can't ever take that away from you.
By now, half the inhabitants of the
Great Plains must have observed

BREAD OVERHEAD

83

our flying loaves rising high."

Phineas T. Gryce shot a fright-
ened look at the west windows and
found his full voice.

"Stop the mills!" he roared at
Meg Winterly, who nodded and
whispered urgently into hex' mike.

"A sensible suggestion," Tin
Philosopher said. "But it comes a
trifle late in the day. If the mills
are still walking and grinding, ap-
proximately seven billion Puffy-
loaves are at this moment cruising
eastward over Middle America.
Remember that a six-month supply
for deep-freeze is involved and that
the current consumption of bread,
due to its matchless airiness, is
eight and one-half loaves per per-
son per day."

Phineas T. Gryce carefully in-
serted both hands into his scanty
hair, feeling for a good grip. He
leaned menacingly toward Roger
who, chin resting on the table, re-
garded him apathetically.

"Hold it!" Meg called sharply.
"Flock of multiple-urgents coming
in. -News Liaison : information bu-
reaus swamped with flying-bread
inquiries. Aero-expresslines : Clear
our airways or face law suit. U. S.
Army: Why do loaves flame when
hit by incendiary bullets? U. S.
Customs: If bread intended for
export, get export license or face
prosecution. Russian Consulate in
Chicago: Advise on destination of
bread-lift. And some Kansas church

blasphemy, of faking miracles — I
don't know why?

The business girl tore off her
headphones. "Roger Snedden," she
cried with a hysteria that would
have dumfounded her underlings,
"you've brought the name of Puffy-
loaf in front of the whole world, all
right! Now do something about the
situation!"

Roger nodded obediently. But
his pallor increased a shade, the
pupils of his eyes disappeared un-
der the upper lids, and his head
burrowed beneath his forearms.

"Oh, boy," Rose Thinker called
gayly to Tin Philosopher, "this
looks like the start of a real crisis
session! Did you remember to
bring spare batteries?"

1VT EANWHILE, the monstrous
-L"-*- flight of Puffy loaves, filling
midwestern skies as no small fliers
had since the days of the passenger
pigeon, soared steadily onward.

Private fliers approached the
brown and glistening bread-front in
curiosity and dipped back in awe.
Aero-expresslines organized sight-
seeing flights along the flanks.
Planes of the government forestry
and agricultural services and 'cop-
ters bearing the Puffyloaf emblem
hovered on the fringes, watching
developments and waiting for or-
ders. A squadron of supersonic
fighters hung menacingly above.

The behavior of birds varied

is accusing us of a hoax inciting to „ considerably. Most fled or gave the

84

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

loaves a wide berth, but some
bolder species, discovering the min-
imal nutritive nature of the trans-
lucent brown objects, attacked
them furiously with beaks and
claws. Hydrogen diffusing slowly
through the crusts had now dis-
tended most of the sealed plastic
wrappers into little balloons, which
ruptured, when pierced, with dis-
concerting pops.

Below, neck-craning citizens
crowded streets and back yards,
cranks and cultists had a field day,
while local and national govern-
ments raged indiscriminately at
Puffyloaf and at each other.

Rumors that a fusion weapon
would be exploded in the midst of
the flying bread drew angry protests
from conservationists and a flood
of telefax pamphlets titled "H-Loaf
or H-bomb?"

Stockholm sent a mystifying
note of praise to the United Na-
tions Food Organization.

Delhi issued nervous denials of a
millet blight that no one had heard
of until that moment and reaf-
firmed India's ability to feed her
population with no outside help
except the usual.

Radio Moscow asserted that the
Kremlin would brook no interfer-
ence in its treatment of the Ukrain-
ians, jokingly referred to the flying
bread as a farce perpetrated by
mad internationalists inhabiting
Cloud Cuckoo Land, added contra-
dictory references to airborne

bread booby-trapped by Capitalist
gangsters, and then fell moodily
silent on the whole topic.

Radio Venus reported to its
winged audience that Earth's
inhabitants were establishing food
depots in the upper air, prepara-
tory to taking up permanent aerial
residence "such as we have always
enjoyed on Venus."

-

TV" EWNEW YORK made f ever-
-L ^ ish preparations for the pas-
sage of the flying bread. Tickets
for sightseeing space in skyscrapers
were sold at high prices; cold meats
and potted spreads were hawked to
viewers with the assurance that
they would be able to snag the
bread out of the air and enjoy a
historic sandwich.

Phineas T. Gryce, escaping from
his own managerial suite, raged
about the city, demanding general
cooperation in the stretching of
great nets between the skyscrapers
to trap the errant loaves. He was
captured by Tin Philosopher, es-
caped again, and was found posted
with oxygen mask and submachine-
gun on the topmost spire of Puffy-
loaf Tower, apparently determined
to shoot down the loaves as they
appeared and before they involved
his company in more trouble with
Customs and the State Department.

Recaptured by Tin Philosopher,
who suffered only minor bullet
holes, he was given a series of mild
electroshocks and returned to the

BREAD OVERHEAD

85

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conference table, calm and clear-
headed as ever.

But the bread flight, swinging
away from a hurricane moving up
the Atlantic coast, crossed a
clouded-in Boston by night and
disappeared into a high Atlantic
overcast, also thereby evading a
local storm generated by the
Weather Department in a last-
minute effort to bring down or at
least disperse the H-loaves.

Warnings and counterwarnings
by Communist and Capitalist gov-
ernments seriously interfered with
military trailing of the flight dur-
ing this period and it was actually
lost in touch with for several days.

At scattered points, seagulls were

observed fighting over individual
loaves floating down from the gray
roof — that was all.

A mood of spirituality strongly
tinged with humor seized the peo-
ple of the world. Ministers sermon-
ized about the bread, variously
interpreting it as a call to charity,
a warning against gluttony, a par-
able of the evanescence of all
earthly things, and a divine joke.
Husbands and wives, facing each
other across their walls of breakfast
toast, burst into laughter. The
mere sight of a loaf of bread any-
where was enough to evoke guf-
faws. An obscure sect, having as
part of its creed the injunction
"Don't take yourself so damn se-

--,

86

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

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riously," won new adherents.

The bread flight, rising above an
Atlantic storm widely reported to
have destroyed it, passed unob-
served across a foggy England and
rose out of the overcast only over
Mittel-europa. The loaves had at
last reached their maximum alti-
tude.

The Sun's rays beat through the
rarified air on the distended plastic
wrappers, increasing still further
the pressure of the confined hydro-
gen. They burst by the millions
and tens of millions. A high-flying
Bulgarian evangelist, who had hap-
pened to mistake the up-lever for
the east-lever in the cockpit of his
flier and who was the sole witness

of the event, afterward described it
as "the foaming of a sea of dia-
monds, the crackle of God's
knuckles."

Y THE millions and tens of
millions, the loaves coasted
down into the starving Ukraine.
Shaken by a week of humor that
threatened to invade even its own
grim precincts, the Kremlin made
a sudden about-face. A new policy
was instituted of communal owner-
ship of the produce of communal
farms, and teams of hunger-fighters
and caravans of trucks loaded with
pumpernickel were dispatched into
the Ukraine.

World distribution was given to

BREAD OVERHEAD

87

a series of photographs showing
peasants queueing up to trade scav-
enged Puffyloaves for traditional
black bread, recently aerated itself

*

but still extra solid by comparison,
the rate of exchange demanded by
the Moscow teams being twenty
Puffyloaves to one of pumper-
nickel.

Another series of photographs,
picturing chubby workers' children
being blown to bits by booby-
trapped bread, was quietly de-
stroyed.

Congratulatory notes were ex-
changed by various national gov-
ernments and world organizations,
including the Brotherhood of Free
Business Machines. The great
bread flight was over, though for
several weeks afterward scattered
falls of loaves occurred, giving rise
to a new folklore of manna among
lonely Arabian tribesmen, and in
one well-authenticated instance in
Tibet, sustaining life in a party of
mountaineers cut off by a snow
slide.

Back in NewNew York, the
managerial board of Puffy Prod-
ucts slumped in utter collapse
around the conference table, the
long crisis session at last ended.
Empty coffee cartons were scat-
tered around the chairs of the three
humans, dead batteries around
those of the two machines. For a
while, there was no movement
whatsoever. Then Roger Snedden
reached out wearily for the ear-

phones where Megera Winterly
had hurled them down, adjusted
them to his head, pushed a button
and listened apathetically.

After a bit, his gaze brightened.
He pushed more buttons and lis-
tened more eagerly. Soon he was
sitting tensely upright on his stool,
eyes bright and lower face all
a-smile, muttering terse comments
and questions into the lapel mike
torn from Meg's fair neck.

The others, reviving, watched
him, at first dully, then with quick-
ening interest, especially when he
jerked off the earphones with a
happy shout and sprang to his feet.

U j ISTEN to this!" he cried in
■*- J a ringing voice. "As a result
of the worldwide publicity, Puffy-
loaves are outselling Fairy Bread
three to one — and that's just the
old carbon-dioxide stock from our
freezers! It's almost exhausted, but
the government, now that the
Ukrainian crisis is over, has taken
the ban off helium and will also
sell us stockpiled wheat if we need
it. We can have our walking mills
burrowing into the wheat caves in
a matter of hours!

"But that isn't all! The far
greater demand everywhere is for
Puffyloaves that will actually float.
Public Relations, Child Liaison
Division, reports that the kiddies
are making their mothers' lives
miserable about it. If only we can
figure out some way to make

88

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

hydrogen non-explosive or the
helium loaf float just a little — "

"I'm sure we can take care of
that quite handily" Tin Philoso-
pher interrupted briskly. "Puffy-
loaf has kept it a corporation secret
— even you've never been told
about it — but just before he went
crazy, Everett Whitehead discov-
ered a way to make bread using
only half as much flour as we do in
the present loaf. Using this secret
technique, which we've been saving
for just such an emergency, it will
be possible to bake a helium loaf as
buoyant in every respect as the

r

hydrogen loaf."

"Good!" Roger cried. "We'll
tether 'em on strings and sell 'em
like balloons. No mother-child
shopping team will leave the store
without a cluster. Buying bread
balloons will be the big event of
the day for kiddies. It'll make the
carry-home shopping load lighter
too! I'll issue orders at once — "

TTE broke off, looking at Phineas
-*--*- T. Gryce, said with quiet
assurance, "Excuse me, sir, if I
seem to be taking too much upon
myself."

"Not at all, son; go straight
ahead," the great manager said ap-
provingly. " You're" — he laughed
in anticipation of getting off a
memorable remark — "rising to the
challenging situation like a genuine
Puffyloaf."

Megera Winterly looked from

the older man to the younger.
Then in a single leap she was upon
Roger, her arms wrapped tightly
around him.

"My sweet little ever-victorious,
self-propelled monkey wrench!" she
crooned in his ear. Roger looked
fatuously over her soft shoulder at
Tin Philosopher who, as if moved
by some similar feeling, reached
over and touched claws with Rose
Thinker.

This, however, was what he tele-
graphed silently to his fellow ma-
chine across the circuit so com-
pleted :

"Good-o, Rosie! That makes an-
other victory for robot-engineered
world unity, though you almost
gave us away at the start with that
'bread overhead' jingle. We've
struck another blow against the
next world war, in which — as we
know only too well! — we machines
would suffer the most. Now if we
can only arrange, say, a fur-famine
in Alaska and a migration of long-
haired Siberian lemmings across
Behring Straits . . . we'd have to
swing the Japanese Current up
there so it'd be warm enough for
the little fellows . . . Anyhow,
Rosie, with a spot of help from the
Brotherhood, those humans will
paint themselves into the peace
corner yet."

Meanwhile, he and Rose Thinker
quietly watched the Blonde Icicle
melt.

FRITZ LEIBER

BREAD OVERHEAD

89

T

BLU

TOW

By EVELYN E. SMITH

As the vastly advanced guardians
of mankind, the Belphins knew how
to make a lesson stick — but whom?

Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS

UDOVICK Eversole sat in a slow part of town, and those who
the golden sunshine out- went in for travel generally pre-
side his house, writing a ferred streets where the pace was

poem as he watched the street flow
gently past him. There were very
few people on it, for he lived in

90

quicker.

Moreover, on a sultry spring af-
ternoon like this one, there would

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

I

be few people wandering abroad.
Most would be lying on sun-kissed
white beaches or in sun-drenched
parks, or, for those who did not
fancy being either kissed or
drenched by the sun, basking in
the comfort of their own air-con-
ditioned villas.

Some would, like Ludovick, be
writing poems; others composing
symphonies; still others painting
pictures. Those who were without
creative talent or the inclination
to indulge it would be relaxing
their well-kept golden bodies in
whatever surroundings they had
chosen to spend this particular one
of the perfect days that stretched
in an unbroken line before every
member of the human race from
the cradle to the crematorium.

Only the Belphins were much
in evidence. Only the Belphins

had duties to perform. Only the
Belphins worked.

Ludovick stretched his own
well-kept golden body and rejoiced
in the knowing that he was a man
and not a Belphin. Immediately
afterward, he was sorry for the
heartless thought. Didn't the Bel-
phins work only to serve humani-
ty? How ungrateful, then, it was
to gloat over them! Besides, he
comforted himself, probably, if the
truth were known, the Belphins
liked to work. He hailed a passing
Belphin for assurance on this point.

Courteous, like all members of
his species, the creature leaped

from the street and listened atten-

■

tively to the young man's ques- *
tion. "We Belphins have but one
like and one dislike," he replied.
"We like what is right and we
dislike what is wrong."

"But how can you tell what is
right and what is wrong?" Ludo-
vick persisted.

"We know" the Belphin said,
gazing reverently across the city
to the blue spire of the tower
where The Belphin of Belphins
dwelt, in constant communication
with every member of his race at
all times, or so they said. "That is
why we were placed in charge of
humanity. Someday you, too, may
advance to the point where you
know, and we shall return whence

»

we came.

"But who placed you in charge,"
Ludovick asked, ''and whence did
you come?" Fearing he might seem
motivated by vulgar curiosity, he
explained, "I am doing research for
an epic poem."

A LIFETIME spent under
r* their gentle guardianship had
made Ludovick able to interpret
the expression that flitted across
this Belphin's frontispiece as a
sad, sweet smile.

"We come from beyond the
stars," he said. Ludovick already
knew that; he had hoped for some-
thing a little more specific. "We
were placed in power by those who
had the right. And the power

THE BLUE TOWER

91

through which we rule is the power
of love! Be happy!"

And with that conventional fare-
well (which also served as a greet-
ing), he stepped onto the side-
walk and was borne off. Ludovick

*

looked after him pensively for a
moment, then shrugged. Why
should the Belphins surrender their
secrets to gratify the idle curiosity
of a poet?

Ludovick packed his portable
scriptwriter in its case and went
to call on the girl next door, whom
he loved with a deep and inter-
mittently requited passion.

As he passed between the tall
columns leading into the Flock-
hart courtyard, he noted with
regret that there were quite a
number of Corisande's relatives
present, lying about sunning them-
selves and sipping beverages which
probably touched the legal limit of
intoxicatability.

Much as he hated to think
harshly of anyone, he did not like
Corisande Flockhart's relatives. He
had never known anybody who
had as many relatives as she did,
and sometimes he suspected they
were not all related to her. Then
he would dismiss the thought as
unworthy of him or any right-
thinking human being. He loved
Corisande for herself alone and not
for her family. Whether they were
actually her family or not was
none of his business.

semblage cordially, sitting down
beside Corisande on the tessellated
pavement.

"Bah!" said old Osmond Flock-
hart, Corisande's grandfather. Lu-
dovick was sure that, underneath
his crustiness, the gnarled patri-
arch hid a heart of gold. Although
he had been mining assiduously,
the young man had not yet been
able to strike that vein; however,
he did not give up hope, for not
giving up hope was one of the
principles that his wise old Bel-
phin teacher had inculcated in
him. Other principles were to lead
the good life and keep healthy.

"Now, Grandfather," Corisande
said, "no matter what your poli-
tics, that does not excuse impolite-

»

ness.

Ludovick wished she would not
allude so blatantly to politics, be-
cause he had a lurking notion that
Corisande's "family" was, in fact,
a band of conspirators . . . such
as still dotted the green and pleas-
ant planet and proved by their
existence that Man was not ad-
vancing anywhere within measur-
able distance of that totality of
knowledge implied by the Belphin.

You could tell malcontents,
even if they did not voice their
dissatisfactions, by their faces. The
vast majority of the human race,
living good and happy lives, had
smooth and pleasant faces. Mal-
contents' faces were lined and

"Be happy!" he greeted the as- sometimes, in extreme cases, fur-

92

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

rowed. Everyone could easily tell came from the stars. Men were
who they were by looking at them, destroying themselves quickly*

through wars, or slowly through
want. There is none of that any

and most people avoided them.

T was not that griping was il-
legal, for the Belphins permitted
free speech and reasonable con-
spiracy; it was that such behavior
was considered ungenteel. Ludo-
vick would never have dreamed of
associating with this set of neigh-
bors, once he had discovered their
tendencies, had he not lost his
heart to the purple-eyed Corisande
at their first meeting.

"Politeness, bah!" old Osmond
said. "To see a healthy young man
simply — simply accepting the
status quo!"

"If the status quo is a good status
quo," Ludovick said uneasily, for

he did not like to discuss such sub-
jects, "why should I not accept it?
We have everything we could pos-
sibly want. What do we lack?"

"Our freedom," Osmond re-
torted.

"But we are free," Ludovick
said, perplexed. "We can say what
we like, do what we like, so long as
it is consonant with the public
good."

"Ah, but who determines what

*

is consonant with the public
good?"

Ludovick could no longer tem-
porize with truth, even for Cori-
sande's sake. "Look here, old man,
I have read books. I know about
the old days before the Belphins

»

more.

"All lies and exaggeration," old
Osmond said. "My grandfather
told me that, when the Belphins
took over Earth, they rewrote all
the textbooks to suit their own
purposes. Now nothing but Bel-
phin propaganda is taught in the
schools."

"But surely some of what they
teach about the past must be true,"
Ludovick insisted. "And today
every one of us has enough to eat
and drink, a place to live, beau-
tiful garments to wear, and all the
time in the world to utilize as he
chooses in all sorts of pleasant ac-
tivities. What is missing?"

"They've taken away our fron-
tiers!"

Behind his back, Corisande
made a little filial face at Ludo-
vick.

Ludovick tried to make the old
man see reason. "But I'm happy.
And everybody is happy, except—
except a few killjoys like you."

"They certainly did a good job
of brainwashing you, boy," Os-
mond sighed. "And of most of the
young ones," he added mourn-
fully. "With each succeeding gen-
eration, more of our heritage is
lost." He patted the girl's hand.
"You're a good girl, Corrie. You
don't hold with this being cared

THE BLUE TOWER

93

for like some damn pet poodle."
"Never mind Osmond, Ever-
sole," one of Corisande's alleged
uncles grinned, "He talks a lot,
but of course he doesn't mean a
quarter of what he says. Come,
have some wine."

TTE handed a glass to Ludovick.
-*"*- Ludovick sipped and coughed.
It tasted as if it were well above

*

the legal alcohol limit, but he
didn't like to say anything. They
were taking an awful risk, though,
doing a thing like that. If they
got caught, they might receive a
public scolding — which was, of
course, no more than they deserved
—but he could not bear to think
of Corisande exposed to such an
ordeal.

"It's only reasonable," the uncle
went on, "that older people should
have a— a thing about being gov-
erned by foreigners."

Ludovick smiled and set his
nearly full glass down on a plinth.
"You could hardly call the Bel-
phins foreigners; they've been on
Earth longer than even the oldest
of us."

"You seem to be pretty chummy
with 'em," the uncle said, look-
ing narrow-eyed at Ludovick.

"No more so than any other
loyal citizen," Ludovick replied.

The uncle sat up and wrapped
his arms around his thick bare
legs. He was a powerful, hairy
brute of a creature who had not

taken advantage of the numerous
cosmetic techniques offered by the
benevolent Belphins. "Don't you
think it's funny they can breathe
our air so easily?"

"Why shouldn't they?" Ludo-
vick bit into an apple that Cori-
sande handed him from one of the
dishes of fruit and other delicacies
strewn about the courtyard. "It's
excellent air," he continued through
a full mouth, "especially now that
it's all purified. I understand that
in the old days—"

"Yes," the uncle said, "but don't
you think it's a coincidence they
breathe exactly the same kind of

r

air we do, considering they claim
to come from another solar sys-
tem?"

"No coincidence at all," said Lu-
dovick shortly, no longer able to
pretend he didn't know what the
other was getting at. He had heard
the ugly rumor before. Of course
sacrilege was not illegal, but it was
in bad taste. "Only one combina-
tion of elements spawns intelli-
gent life."

"They say," the uncle continued,
impervious to Ludovick's uncon-
cealed dislike for the subject, "that
there's really only one Belphin,
who lives in the Blue Tower— in a
tank or something, because he can't
breathe our atmosphere— and that
the others are a sort of robot he
sends out to do his work for him."

"Nonsense!" Ludovick was
goaded to irritation at last. "How

94

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

could a robot have that delicate
play of expression, that subtle
economy of movement?"

Corisande and the uncle ex-
changed glances. "But they are
absolutely blank," the uncle be-
gan hesitantly. "Perhaps, t with
your rich poetic imagination . . ."

"See?" old Osmond remarked
with satisfaction. "The kid's brain- not like to be the cynosure of all

source of power," Ludovic in-
formed them, smiling to himself,
for his old Belphin teacher had
taken great care to instill a sense
of humor into him. "A Belphin was
explaining that to me only today."
Twenty heads swiveled toward
him. He felt uncomfortable, for he
was a modest young man and did

washed. I told you so."

??"PVEN if The Belphin is a

-" single entity," Ludovick
went on, "that doesn't necessarily
make him less benevolent—"

He was again interrupted by the
grandfather. "I won't listen to any
more of this twaddle. Benevolent,
bah! He or she or it or them is
or are just plain exploiting us!
Taking our mineral resources away
—I've seen 'em loading ore on the
spaceships— and— "

"—and exchanging it for other
resources from the stars," Ludo-
vick said tightly, "without which
we could not have the perfectly
balanced society we have today.
Without which we would be, tech-
nologically, back in the dark ages
from which they rescued us."

"It's not the stuff they bring
in from outside that runs this tech-
nology," the uncle said. "It's some
power they've got that we can't
seem to figure out. Though Lord
knows we've tried," he added mu-
singly.

"Of course they have their own

a

eyes.

"Tell us, dear boy," the uncle
said, grabbing Ludovick's glass
from the plinth and filling it, "what
exactly did he say?"

said the Belphins rule
through the power of love."

The glass crashed to the tes-
serae as the uncle uttered a very
unworthy word.

"And I suppose it was love that
killed Mieczyslaw and George
when they tried to storm the Blue
Tower—" old Osmond began, then
halted at the looks he was getting
from everybody.

Ludovick could no longer pre-
tend his neighbors were a group
of eccentrics whom he himself was
eccentric enough to regard as
charming.

"So!" He stood up and wrapped
his mantle about him. "I knew
you were against the government,
and, of course, you have a legal
right to disagree with its policies,
but I didn't think you were ac-
tual—actual—" he dredged a word
up out of his schooldays — "anar-
chists"

THE BLUE TOWER

95

96

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

know. They are harmless."

"Harmless!" Ludovick repeated.
"Why, I understand they've al-
ready tried to— to attack the Blue
Tower by force!"

"Quite. And failed. For we are
protected from hostile forces, as
you were told earlier, by the power
of love."

Ludovick knew, of course, that
the Belphin used the word love
metaphorically, that the Tower
was protected by a series of high-
ly efficient barriers of force to re-
pel attackers— barriers which, he
realized now, from the sad fate of
Mieczyslaw and George, were po-
tentially lethal. However, he did
UTSIDE the Flockhart villa, not blame the Belphin for being

He turned to the girl, who was
looking thoughtful as she stroked
the glittering jewel that always
hung at her neck. "Corisande, how
can you stay with these—" he
found another word— "these sub-
versives?"

She smiled sadly. "Don't for-
get: they're my family, Ludovick,
and I owe them dutiful respect, no
matter how pig-headed they are."
She pressed his hand. "But don't
give up hope."

That rang a bell inside his brain.
"I won't," he vowed, giving her
hand a return squeeze. "I promise
I won't."

he paused, struggling with his
inner self. It was an unworthy
thing to inform upon one's neigh- Flockharts running about subvert-

so cagy about his race's source of
power, not with people like the

bors; on the other hand, could he
stand idly by and let those neigh-
bors attempt to destroy the social
order? Deciding that the greater
good was the more important— and
that, moreover, it was the only way
of taking Corisande away from all
this— he went in search of a Bel-
phin. That is, he waited until one
glided past and called to him to
leave the walk.

"I wish to report a conspiracy
at No. 7 Mimosa Lane," he said.
"The girl is innocent, but the
others are in it to the hilt."

ing and whatnot.

"You certainly do have a won-
derful intercommunication sys-
tem," he murmured.

"Everything about us is won-
derful," the Belphin said noncom-
mittally. "That's why we're so
good to you people. Be happy!"
And he was off.

But Ludovick could not be hap-
py. He wasn't precisely sad yet,
but he was thoughtful. Of course
the Belphins knew better than he
did, but still . . . Perhaps they un-
derestimated the seriousness of the

The Belphin appeared to think Flockhart conspiracy. On the other

for a minute. Then he gave off a
smile. "Oh, them," he said. "We

hand, perhaps it was he who was
taking the Flockharts too serious-

THE BLUE TOWER

97

ly. Maybe he should investigate
further before doing anything rash.

Later that night, he slipped over
to the Flockhart villa and nosed
about in the courtyard until he
found the window behind which
the family was conspiring. He
peered through a chink in the cur-
tains, so he could both see and
hear.

Corisande was saying, "And so
I think there is a lot in what Lu-
dovick said . . ."

Bless her, he thought emotional-
ly. Even in the midst of her plot-
ting, she had time to spare a kind
word for him. And then it hit him:
she, too, was a plotter.

"You suggest that we try to
turn the power of love against the
Belphins?" the uncle asked ironi-
cally.

Corisande gave a rippling laugh
as she twirled her glittering pen-
dant. "In a manner of speaking,"
she said. "I have an idea for a
secret weapon which might do the
trick-"

A T that moment, Ludovick
-^*- stumbled over a jug which
some careless relative had ap-
parently left lying about the court-
yard. It crashed to the tesserae,
spattering Ludovick's legs and
sandals with a liquid which later
proved to be extremely red wine.

"There's someone outside!" the
uncle declared, half-rising.

"Nonsense!" Corisande said, put-

ting her hand on his shoulder. "I
didn't hear anything."

The uncle looked dubious, and
Ludovick thought it prudent to
withdraw at this point. Besides, he
had heard enough. Corisande— his
Corisande— was an integral part of
the conspiracy.

He lay down to sleep that night
beset by doubts. If he told the
Belphins about the conspiracy, he
would be betraying Corisande. As
a matter of fact, he now remem-
bered, he had already told them
about the conspiracy and they
hadn't believed him. But supposing
he could convince them, how
could he give Corisande up to
them? True, it was the right thing
to do— but, for the first time in his
life, he could not bring himself
to do what he knew to be right.
He was weak, weak— and weak-
ness was sinful. His old Belphin
teacher had taught him that, too.

As Ludovick writhed restlessly
upon his bed, he became aware
that someone had come into his
chamber.

"Ludovick," a soft, beloved voice
whispered, "I have come to ask
your help . . ." It was so dark, he
could not see her; he knew where
was only by the glitter of the jewel
on her neck-chain as it arced
through the blackness.

"Corisande . . ." he breathed.

"Ludovick . . ." she sighed.

Now that the amenities were
over, she resumed, "Against my

98

GALAXY SCIENCE' FICTION

will, I have been involved in the
family plot. My uncle has invented
a secret weapon which he believes
will counteract the power of the
barriers."

"But I thought you devised it!"
"So it was you in the court-
yard. Well, what happened was I
wanted to gain time, so I said I
had a secret weapon of my own
invention which I had not per-
fected, but which would cost con-
siderably less than my uncle's
model. We have to watch the
budget, you know, because we can
hardly expect the Belphins to sup-
ply the components for this job.
Anyhow, I thought that, while my
folks were waiting for me to finish
it, you would have a chance to
warn the Belphins."

"Corisande," he murmured, "you
are as noble and clever as you are
beautiful."

THEN he caught the full import
of her remarks. "Me/ But they
won't pay any attention to me!"

"How do you know?" When he
remained silent, she said, "I sup-
pose you've already tried to warn
them about us."

"I— I said you had nothing to
do with the plot."

"That was good of you." She
continued in a warmer tone : "How
many Belphins did you warn,
then?"

"Just one. When you tell one
something, you tell them all. You

know that. Everyone knows that."„

"That's just theory," she said.
"It's never been proven. All we do
know is that they have some sort
of central clearing house of infor-
mation, presumably The Belphin
of Belphins. But we don't know
that they are incapable of thinking
or acting individually. We don't
really know much about them
at all; they're very secretive."

"Aloof," he corrected her, "as
befits a ruling race. But always af-
fable."

"You must warn as many Bel-
phins as you can."

"And if none listens to me?"

"Then," she said dramatically,
"you must approach The Belphin
of Belphins himself."

"But no human being has ever
come near him!" he said plain-
tively. "You know that all those
who have tried perished. And that
can't be a rumor, because your
grandfather said—"

"But they came to attack The
Belphin. You're coming to warn
him! That makes a big difference.
Ludovick . . ." She took his hands
in hers; in the darkness, the jewel
swung madly on her presumably
heaving bosom. "This is bigger
than both of us. It's for Earth."

He knew it was his patriotic
duty to do as she said; still, he
had enjoyed life so much. "Cori-
sande, wouldn't it be much simpler
if we just destroyed your uncle's
secret weapon?"

THE BLUE TOWER

99

"He'd only make another. Don't
you see, Ludovick, this is our only
chance to save the Belphins, to
save humanity . . . But, of course,
I don't have the right to send you.
I'll go myself."

"No, Corisande," he sighed. "I
can't let you go. I'll do it."

TVTEXT morning, he set out to
*•* warn Belphins. He knew it
wasn't much use, but it was all he
could do. The first half dozen
responded in much the same way
the Belphin he had warned the
previous day had done, by cour-
teously acknowledging his solici-
tude and assuring him there was
no need for alarm; they knew all
about the Flockharts and every-
thing would be all right.

After that, they started to get
increasingly huffy— which would,
he thought, substantiate the theory
that they were all part of one vast
coordinate network of identity. Es-
pecially since each Belphin be-
haved as if Ludovick had been
repeatedly annoying him.

Finally, they refused to get off
the walks when he hailed them—
which was unheard of, for no Bel-
phin had ever before failed to
respond to an Earthman's call—
and when he started running along
the walks after them, they ran
much faster than he could.

At last he gave up and wan-
dered about the city for hours,
speaking to neither human nor

Belphin, wondering what to do.
That is, he knew what he had to
do; he was wondering how to do
it. He would never be able to
reach The Belphin of Belphins.
No human being had ever done
it. Mieczyslaw and George had
died trying to reach him (or it).
Even though their intentions had
been hostile and Ludovick's would
be helpful, there was little chance
he would be allowed to reach The
Belphin with all the other Bel-
phins against him. What guaran-
tee was there that The Belphin
would not be against him, too?

And yet he knew that he would
have to risk his life; there was no
help for it. He had never wanted
to be a hero, and here he had
heroism thrust upon him. He knew
he could not succeed; equally well,
he knew he could not turn back,
for his Belphin teacher had in-
structed him in the meaning of
duty.

It was twilight when he ap-
proached the Blue Tower. Com-
mending himself to the Infinite
Virtue, he entered. The Belphin
at the reception desk did not give
off the customary smiling expres-
sion. In fact, he seemed to radiate
a curiously apprehensive aura.

"Go back, young man," he said.

"You're not wanted here."

"I must see The Belphin of Bel-
phins. I must warn him against the
Flockharts."

"He has been warned," the re-

100

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

ceptionist told him. "Go home and
be happy!"

"I don't trust you or your
brothers. I must see The Belphin
himself."

Suddenly this particular Bel-
phin lost his commanding manners.
He began to wilt, insofar as so
rigidly constructed a creature
could go limp. "Please, we've done
so much for you. Do this for us."

"The Belphin of Belphins did
things for us," Ludovick countered.
"You are all only his followers.
How do v I know you are really fol-
lowing him? How do I know you
haven't turned against him?"

Without giving the creature a
chance to answer, he strode for-
ward. The Belphin attempted to
bar his way. Ludovick knew one
Belphin was a myriad times as
strong as a human, so it was out
of utter futility that he struck.

The Belphin collapsed com-
pletely, flying apart in a welter of
fragile springs and gears. The fact
was of some deeper significance,
Ludovick knew, but he was too
numbed by his incredible success
to be able to think clearly. All he
knew was that The Belphin would
be able to explain things to him.

ELLS began to clash and
clang. That meant the force
barriers had gone up. He could
see the shimmering insubstance of
the first one before him. Squaring
his shoulders, he charged it . . .

and walked right through. He
looked himself up and down. He
was alive and entire.

Then the whole thing was a
fraud; the barriers were not lethal
—or perhaps even actual. But what
of Mieczyslaw? And George? And
countless rumored others? He
would not let himself even try to
think of them. He would not let
himself even try to think of any-
thing save his duty.

A staircase spiraled up ahead
of him. A Belphin was at its foot.
Behind him, a barrier iridesced.

"Please, young man—" the Bel-
phin began. "You don't understand.
Let me explain."

But Ludovick destroyed the
thing before it could say anything
further, and he passed right
through the barrier. He had to get
to the top and warn The Belphin
of Belphins, whoever or whatever
he (or it) was, that the Flock-
harts had a secret weapon which
might be able to annihilate it (or
him). Belphin after Belphin Lu-
dovick destroyed, and barrier after
barrier he penetrated until he
reached the top. At the head of the
stairs was a vast golden door.

"Go no further, Ludovick Ever-
sole!" a mighty voice roared from
within. "To open that door is to
bring disaster upon your race."

But all Ludovick knew was that
he had to get to The Belphin with-
in and warn him. He battered
down the door; that is, he would

THE BLUE TOWER

101

have battered down the door if it concerned, for no more came. If,
had not turned out to be unlocked, as they had said themselves, some

A stream of noxious vapor rushed
out of the opening, causing him to
black out.

When he came to, most of the
vapor had dissipated. The Belphin
of Belphins was already dying of
asphyxiation, since it was, in fact,
a single alien entity who breathed
another combination of elements.
The room at the head of the stairs
had been its tank.

"You fool . . ." it gasped.
"Through your muddle-headed in-
tegrity . . . you have destroyed not
only me . . . but Earth's future.
I tried to make . . . this planet
a better place for humanity . . .
and this is my reward . . ."

"But I don't understand!" Ludo-
vick wept. "Why did you let me
do it? Why were Mieczyslaw and
George and all the others killed?
Why was it that I could pass the
barriers and they could not?"

"The barriers were triggered . . .
to respond to hostility . . . You
meant well ... so our defenses . . .
could not work." Ludovick had to
bend low to hear the creature's
last words: "There is . . . Earth
proverb . . . should have warned

■

me . . . 'I can protect myself . . .
against my enemies . . . but who
will protect me . . . from my
friends' . *»

• m •

The Belphin of Belphins died in
Ludovick's arms. He was the last
of his race, so far as Earth was

outside power had sent them to
take care of the human race, then
that power had given up the race
as a bad job. If they were merely
exploiting Earth, as the malcon-
tents had kept suggesting, ap-
parently it had proven too dan-
gerous or too costly a venture.

*

^HORTLY after The Belphin's
^ demise, the Flockharts arrived
en masse. "We won't need your
secret weapons now," Ludovick
told them dully. "The Belphin of
Belphins is dead."

Corisande gave one of the
rippling laughs he was to grow to
hate so much. "Darling, you were
my secret weapon all along!" She
beamed at her "relatives," and it
was then he noticed the faint lines
of her forehead. "I told you I
could use the power of love to de-
stroy the Belphins!" And then she
added gently : "I think there is no
doubt who is head of 'this family'
now."

The uncle gave a strained laugh.
"You're going to have a great little
first lady there, boy," he said to
Ludovick.

"First lady?" Ludovick repeated,
still absorbed in his grief.

"Yes, I imagine the people will
want to make you our first Presi-
dent by popular acclaim."

Ludovick looked at him through

a haze of tears. "But I killed The

102

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

Belphin. I didn't mean to, but...
they must hate me!"

"Nonsense, my boy; they'll
adore you. You'll be a hero!"

Events proved him right. Even
those people who had lived in ap-
parent content under the Belphins,
accepting what they were given
and seemingly enjoying their care-
free lives, now declared themselves
to have been suffering in silent re-
sentment all along. They hurled
flowers and adulatory speeches at
Ludovick and composed extreme-
ly flattering songs about him.

Shortly after he was universally
acclaimed President, he married
Corisande. He couldn't escape.

"Why doesn't she become Presi-
dent herself?" he wailed, when the
relatives came and found him hid-
ing in the ruins of the Blue Tower.
The people had torn the Tower
down as soon as they were sure
The Belphin was dead and the
others thereby hendered inoperant.
"It would spare her a lot of
bother."

"Because she is not The Bel-
phin-slayer," the uncle said, drag-
ging him out. "Besides, she loves
you. Come on, Ludovick, be a
man." So they hauled him off to
the wedding and, amid much feast-
ing, he was married to Corisande.

TTE never drew another happy
■*"*- breath. In the first place, now
that The Belphin was dead, all the
machinery that had been operated

by him stopped and no one knew
how to fix it. The sidewalks
stopped moving, the air condi-
tioners stopped conditioning, the
food synthesizers stopped synthe-
sizing, and so on. And, of course,
everybody blamed it all on Ludo-
vick — even that year's run of bad
weather.

There were famines, riots,
plagues, and, after the waves of
mob hostility had coalesced into
national groupings, wars. It was
like the old days again, precisely
as described in the textbooks.

In the second place, Ludovick
could never forget that, when Cori-
sande had sent him to the Blue
Tower, she could not have been
sure that her secret weapon would
work. Love might not have con-
quered all— in fact, it was the more
likely hypothesis that it wouldn't
—and he would have been killed
by the first barrier. And no hus-
band likes to think that his wife
thinks he's expendable; it makes
him feel she doesn't really love
him.

So, in thirtieth year of his reign
as Dictator of Earth, Ludovick
poisoned Corisande— that is, had
her poisoned, for by now he had a
Minister of Assassination to handle
such little matters— and married a
very pretty, very young, very af-
fectionate blonde. He wasn't par-
ticularly happy with her, either,
but at least it was a change.

— EVELYN E. SMITH

THE BLUE TOWER

103

': ; .m:: : :-:v.v

GALAXY'S

Star Shelf

TAKE ME TO YOUR PRESI-
DENT by Leonard Wibberley.

opinion of A-l, born Jeremy Black-
wood in the village of Mars, near
G. P. Putnam's Sons, N. Y. f $3.50 Leeds, England. Because of losing

a buddy in the Normandy fighting,
the well-loved A- 1 frequently holds
forth on his favorite topic over a
pint in the Plough and Stars.

A-l's chance comes completely
inadvertantly when his unrecogniz-
able-as-such dog gets lost near
Britain's secret experimental rocket
ship.

His military training enables
him to sneak into the guarded area
where his curiosity overcomes cau-
tion after recovery of his dog.
While he is investigating the ship,

O established Wibberley fans
( The Mouse that Roared, etc. )
and neophytes alike, his new book
will be a welcome sweet breath
of sanity in a mad halitosic world.
In this instance, 1960 finds the
world in the same hot-cold frenzy.
Now everyone knows that if only
the leaders of the various nations
can be brought together by an im-
partial referee, there just isn't any
reason why all current problems
can't be solved. And that's also the

104

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

it suddenly takes off and lands him
ker-plunk in a lake on an Indian
reservation in Nevada. Since his

like over lost fish or dangerous en-
counters and, in general, act more
akin to Huck Finn than to Yves

clothes are lost in the ship's flooded Cousteau in the unabashed won-

half, he has to don a weird-look-
ing but very impressive orange-
and-green pressure suit.

Needless to say, all the circum-
stances involved, plus the fact that
he was born in Mars, tend to com-
pound a considerable misunder-
standing. Being no dope, A-l can
see the strength of his position and
the possibility of forcing a super-
summit meeting despite the fact
that the British Prime Minister
knows he is a fraud.

But don't expect me to tell you
more.

You'll enjoy this Man From

Mars unless the cold war has
frozen your funny-bone.

DAHLAK by Gianni Roghi and
F. Baschieri. Essential Books, Inc.,
N. J., $6.00

HP HIS account of the Italian Na-
■*■ tional Underwater Expedition
to the Red Sea arrived too late
for inclusion in my watersoaked
column a couple of months back.
The tardiness, however, makes its
topic unique this month, in keep-
ing with the character of the book.
The word "Character" is advis-
able, for this true journal of a sci-
entific expedition would be better
described as an Italian sea-opera.
Its scientist heroes emote Pagliacci-

der with which they approach their
study.

Although all the members had
considerable undersea experience
in the Mediterranean, the tidal
waters of the Red Sea fill them
with vociferous awe. This by no
means reflects on their professional
ability, but merely heightens their
delightful humanness. The pages
are virtually moist with tears over
the necessity . of death-dealing in
scientific collection, and on the oc-
casions when hunting became ne-
cessary for the survival of the piti-
fully under-financed party, the self-
justification is almost embassrass-
ing.

The Red Sea is one of the
strangest areas in the world. At
high tide, the surface temperature
is 97° and the atmosphere any-
thing from 105° up in the shade.
The sea is surrounded by the most
arid of deserts. Even its islands
are wastelands.

One of the most amusing sec-
tions of the book tells of a diver
becoming "cockeyed" from adop-
tion by a pilot fish which stationed
itself within inches of his face-plate
for an hour and refused to budge
despite shooting, biting, grabbing,
spitting.

And that is the book, too —
cockeyed but enthralling.

* * * * * SHELF

105

BEYOND THE FIVE SENSES,
edited by Eileen J. Garrett. J. B.
Lippincott Co., Philadelphia, $4.95

"11/fRS. Garrett, editor and pub-
-*-" lisher of Tomorrow, a review
of psychical research, is also presi-
dent of The Parapsychology Foun-
dation.

Her book, a large anthologi-
zation of articles which appeared
in her publication, touches on such
subjects as spirits and poltergeists,
hypnosis, precognition and other
ESP or related-to-ESP manifesta-
tions.

Interesting, if inconclusive, read-
ing.

HIGH SPEED FLIGHT by E.
Ower and J. Nayler. Philosophical
Library, N. Y., $10.00

TY/HEN aircraft began to ap-
" proach the speed of sound,
the problems of designers grew
even faster. And there are addi-
tional headaches unthought of only
a few short years ago, now that
the heat barrier has reared its hot
head.

Ower and Nayler are both Brit-
ish research experts and they have
written an authoritative survey of
this specialized subject that is af-
fecting us all.

GUIDED WEAPONS by Eric
Burgess. The Macmillan Co., N. Y.,
$5.00

106

"C 1 VEN more specialized than the
-" above book, Guided Weapons
deals solely with the military mis-
sile. Naturally it can't be as up-to-
the-minute as the daily papers, but
is excellent backgrounding for the
otherwise confusing news releases.

THE LAST SECRETS OF THE
EARTH by Bernard Busson and
Gerard Leroy. G. P. Putnam's
Sons, N. y., $3.50

11/f ESSRS. Busson and Leroy
■*•" have just about covered the
field concerning Earth's present-
day phenomenal mysteries. Being
journalists, they have approached
their subject matter from a pro-
fessional angle and have produced
a volume that professionally suc-
ceeds in gripping the interest.

Wisely, they have not concerned
themselves with origins or future
possibilities, being content to pre-
sent the known facts and the di-
vergent opinions of experts on

i

such controversial subjects as Fly-
ing Saucers and the Abominable
Snowman, among others. They
have reproduced a fantastic pho-
tograph of a half skull, snapped
during the London Daily Mail ex-
pedition in 1953, that shows only
an enormous peaked cranium with
a coarsely hair-covered central
ridge.

Other chapters cover such topics
as the unknown sea, the Earth's
fires, the Antarctic, the coelacanth

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

as possible ancestor of our race,
and caverns and underground

rivers.

THE ISOTOPE MAN by Charles
Eric Maine. /. B. Lippincott Co.,
Phila. & TV. Y., $3.00

[PPINCOTT has termed this
a "novel of menace," which is
the identical tag it bestowed upon
The Power by Frank Robinson. I
had no desire to compare the two
books, but it appears that the pub-
lishers themselves are begging for
comparison.

Both novels employ the chase as
plot motivater, but there similari-
ties end. Power had just that: a
mounting terror as the human
quarry neared the killer. Maine
has his hero blunder back and
forth over the English countryside
in pursuit of an amazingly incom-
petent bungler who, at the start
of the story, has already botched
the job of murdering an atomic
scientist so that a dupe can im-

personate him. Maine does employ
the interesting device of having a
character pushed mentally seven
seconds into the future so that he
answers questions before they are

asked.

But not even that can save
the story from the thunder and
blunder of hero and villain alike.

JOURNAL OF ASCIENTICIAN
by Piero Modigliani. Philosophical
Library, N. Y., $3.75

1~\R, Modigliani's book is more
*-* a scrapbook of random jot-
tings than a journal. His observa-
tions are not limited to things sci-
entific and have the virtue of being
caustic yet gentle, with a fine un-
derrating of humor.

Even if the doctor's dreams
hadn't endeared him to me, he
would still be a kindred spirit in
that he, too, endures the torments
of commuting because he loves to
read on the train.

FLOYD C. GALE

CANCER SOC8ETY

• • * • * SHELF

107

By ROGER DEE

Keeping this cargo meant death
— to jettison it meant to make
flotsam and jetsam of a world!

Illustrated by MARTIN

THE Ciriimian ship was
passing in hyperdrive
through a classic three-
body system, comprising in this
case a fiercely white sun circled
by a fainter companion and a
single planet that swung in pre-
cise balance, when the Canthorian
Zid broke out of its cage in the
specimen hold.

Of the ship's social quartet,
Chafis One and Two were asleep

at the moment, dreaming wistful
dreams of conical Ciriimian cities
spearing up to a soft and plum-
colored sky. The Zid raged into
their communal rest cell, smashed
them down from their gymbaled
sleeping perches and, with the
ravening blood-hunger of its kind,
devoured them before they could
wake enough to teleport to
safety.

Chafis Three and Four, on psi

108

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

shift in the forward control cubi-
cle, might have fallen as easily
if the mental screamings of their
fellows had not warned them in
time. As it was, they had barely
time to teleport themselves to
the after hold, as far as possible
from immediate danger, and to con-
sider the issue while the Zid
lunged about the ship in search
of them with malignant cries
and a great shrieking of claws on
metal.

Their case was the more des-
perate because the Chafis were pro-
fessional freighters with little ex-
perience of emergency. Hauling a
Zid from Canthorian jungles to
a Ciriimian zoo was a prosaic
enough assignment so long as the

cage held, but with the raging
brute swiftly smelling them out,
they were helpless to catch and
restrain it.

When the Zid found them, they
had no other course but to tele-
port back to the control cubicle
and wait until the beast should
snuff them down again. The Zid
learned quickly, so quickly that
it was soon clear that its physical
strength would far outlast their
considerable but limited teleki-
netic ability.

Still they possessed their share
of owlish Ciriimian logic and hit
soon enough upon the one prac-
tical course — to jettison the Zid
on the nearest world demonstrably
free of intelligent life.

HP HEY worked hurriedly, be-
-*■ tween jumps fore and aft.
Chafi Three, while they were still
in the control cubicle, threw the
ship out of hyperdrive within
scant miles of the neighboring
sun's single planet. Chafi Four,
on the next jump, scanned the
ship's charts and identified the
system through which they

traveled.

Luck was with them. The sys-
tem had been catalogued some
four Ciriimian generations before
and tagged: Planet undeveloped.
Tranquil marine intelligences

only.

The discovery relieved them
greatly for the reason that no
Ciriimian, even to save his own
feathered skin, would have set
down such a monster as the Zid
among rational but vulnerable

entities.

The planet was a water world,
bare of continents and only
sparsely sprinkled with minor
archipelagoes. The islands suited
the Chafis' purpose admirably.

"The Zid does not swim," Chafi
Four radiated. "Marooned, it can
do no harm to marine intelli-
gences."

"Also," Chafi Three pointed out
as they dodged to the control
cubicle again just ahead of the
slavering Zid, "we may return
later with a Canthorian hunting
party and recover our invest-
ment."

TRADERS RISK

109

Closing their perception against
the Zid's distracting ragings, they
set to work with perfect coordina-
tion.

Chafi Three set down the ship
on an island that was only one
of a freckling chain of similar
islands. Chafi Four projected him-
self first to the opened port; then,
when the Zid charged after him,
to the herbivore-cropped sward
of tropical setting outside.

The Zid lunged out. Chafi Four
teleported inside again. Chafi
Three closed the port. Together
they relaxed their perception
shields in relief —

Unaware in their consternation
that they committed the barbar-
ous lapse of vocalizing, they
twittered aloud when they rea-
lized the extent of their error.

Above the far, murmurous
whisper of expected marine cere-
bration there rose an uncoordi-
nated mishmash of thought from
at least two strong and relatively
complex intelligences.

"Gas - breathing!" Chafi Four
said unbelievingly. "Warm-
blooded, land-dwelling, mamma-
lian!"

"A Class Five culture," Chafi
agreed shakenly. His aura quiv-
ered with the shock of betrayal.
"The catalogue was wrong"

Ironically, their problem was
more pressing now than before.
Unless checked, the Zid would
rapidly depopulate the island —

and, to check it, they must break
a prime rule of Galactic protocol
in asking the help of a new and
untested species.

But they had no choice. They
teleported at once into the pres-
ence of the two nearby natives —
and met with frustration beyond
Ciriimian experience.

JEFF Aubray glimpsed the Ciri-
imian ship's landing because
the morning was a Oneday, and
on Onedays his mission to the
island demanded that he be up
and about at sunrise.

For two reasons: On Onedays,
through some unfailing miracle
of Calaxian seamanship, old
Charlie Mack sailed down in his
ancient Island Queen from the
township that represented colo-
nial Terran civilization in Procy-
nian Archipelago 147, bringing
supplies and gossip to last Jeff
through the following Tenday.
The Queen would dock at Jeff's
little pier at dawn; she was never
late.

Also on Onedays, necessarily
before Charlie Mack's visit, Jeff
must assemble his smuggled com-
municator — kept dismantled and
hidden from suspicious local eyes
— and report to Earth Interests
Consulate his progress during the
cycle just ended. The ungodly
hour of transmission, naturally,
was set to coincide with the clos-
ing of the Consul's field office

110

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

halfway around the planet.

So the nacreous glory of Pro-
cyon's rising was just tinting the
windows of Jeff's cottage when
he aligned and activated his little
communicator on his breakfast
table. Its three-inch screen lighted
to signal and a dour and disap-
pointed Consul Satterfield looked
at him. Behind Satterfield, fore-
shortened to gnomishness by the
pickup, lurked Dr. Hermann,
Earth Interests' resident zoologist.

"No progress," Jeff reported,
"except that the few islanders
I've met seem to be accepting
me at last. A little more time and
they might let me into the Town-
ship, where I can learn something.
If Homeside — "

"You've had seven Tendays,"
Satterfield said. "Homeside won't
wait longer, Aubray. They need
those calm-crystals too badly."

"They'll use force?" Jeff had
considered the possibility, but its
immediacy appalled him. "Sir,
these colonists had been autono-
mous for over two hundred years,
ever since the Fourth War cut
them off from us. Will Homeside
deny their independence?"

His sense of loss at Satterfield's
grim nod stemmed from some-
thing deeper than sympathy for
the islanders. It found roots in
his daily rambles over the little
island granted him by the Town-
ship for the painting he had be-
gun as a blind to his assignment,

and in the gossip of old Charlie
Mack and the few others he had
met. He had learned to appre-
ciate the easy life of the islands
well enough to be dismayed now
by what must happen under EI
pressure to old Charlie and his
handful of sunbrowned fisherfolk.

T TNEXPECTEDLY, because
^ Jeff had not considered that
it might matter, he was disturbed
by the realization that he would-
n't be seeing Jennifer, old Charlie
Mack's red-haired niece, once oc-
cupation began. Jennifer, who
sailed with her uncle and did a
crewman's work as a matter of
course, would despise the sight
of him.

The Consul's pessimism jolted
Jeff back to the moment at hand.

"Homeside will deny their
autonomy, Aubray. I've had a
warp-beam message today order-
ing me to move in."

The situation was desperate
enough at home, Jeff had to ad-
mit. Calaxian calm-crystals did
what no refinement of Terran
therapeutics had been able to
manage. They erased the fears
of the neurotic and calmed the
quiverings of the hypertensive —
both in alarming majority in the
shattering aftermath of the Fourth
War — with no adverse effects
at all. Permanent benefit was slow
but cumulative, offering for the
first time a real step toward ulti-

TRADERS RISK

111

mate stability. The medical, psy-
chiatric and political fields cried
out for crystals and more crystals.

"If the islanders would tell us
their source and let us help de-
velop it," Satterfield said peevish-
ly, "instead of doling out a hand-
ful of crystals every Tenday, there
wouldn't be any need of action.
Homeside feels they're just let-
ting us have some of the surplus."

"Not likely," Jeff said. "They
don't use the crystals themselves."

Old Dr. Hermann put his chin
almost on the Consul's shoulder
to present his wizened face to
the scanner.

"Of course they don't," he said.
"On an uncomplicated, even
simple-minded world like this,
who would need crystals? But
maybe they fear glutting the
market or the domination of out-
side capital coming in to develop
the source. When people back-
slide, there's no telling what's on
their minds and we have no time
to waste negotiating or convinc-
ing them. In any case, how could
they stop us from moving in?"
Abruptly he switched to his own
interest. "Aubray, have you
learned anything new about the
Scoops?"

"Nothing beyond the fact that
the islanders don't talk about
them," Jeff said. "I've seen per-
haps a dozen offshore during the
seven cycles I've been here. One
usually surfaces outside my har-

bor at about the time old Charlie
Mack's supply boat comes in."

Thinking of Charlie Mack
brought a forced end to his re-
port. "Charlie's due now. I'll call
back later."

He cut the circuit, hurrying
to have his communicator stowed
away before old Charlie's arrival
— not, he thought bitterly, that
being found out now would make
any great difference.

STEPPING out into the brief
^ Calaxian dawn, he caught his
glimpse of the Ciriimian ship's
landing before the island forest
of palm-ferns cut it off from sight.
Homeside hadn't been bluffing,
he thought, assuming as a matter
of course that this was the task
force Satterfield had been ordered
to send.

"They didn't waste any time,"
Jeff growled. "Damn them."

He ignored the inevitable glory
of morning rainbow that just pre-
ceded Procyon's rising and strode
irritably down to his miniature
dock. He was still scowling over
what he should tell Charlie Mack
when the Island Queen hove into
view.

She was a pretty sight. There
was an artist's perception in Jeff
in spite of his drab years of EI
patrol duty; the white puff of
sail on dark-green sea, gliding
across calm water banded with
lighter and darker striae where

112

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

submerged shoals lay, struck
something responsive in him. The
comparison it forced between
Calaxia and Earth, whose yawning
Fourth War scars and heritage of
anxieties made calm-crystals so
desperately necessary, oppressed
him. Calaxia was wholly unscarred,
her people without need of the
calm-crystals they traded.

Something odd in the set of the
Queen's sails puzzled him until
he identified the abnormality. In
spite of distance and the swift
approach of the old fishing boat,
he could have sworn that her
sails bellied not with the wind,
but against.

They fell slack, however, when
the Queen reached his channel
and flapped lazily, reversing to
catch the wind and nose her cau-
tiously into the shallows. Jeff dis-
missed it impatiently — a change
of wind or some crafty maneuver
of old Charlie Mack's to take ad-
vantage of the current.

Jeff had just set foot on his
dock when it happened. Solid as
the planking itself, and all but
blocking off his view of the near-
ing Island Queen, stood a six-foot
owl.

It was wingless and covered
smoothly with pastel-blue feath-
ers. It stood solidly on carefully
manicured yellow feet and stared
at him out of square violet eyes.

Involuntarily he took a back-
ward step, caught his heel on a

sun-warped board and sat down
heavily.

"Well, what the devil!" he said
inanely.

The owl winced and disap-
peared without a sound.

JEFF got up shakily and stum-
bled to the dock's edge. A chill
conviction of insanity gripped him
when he looked down on water
lapping smooth and undisturbed
below.

"I've gone mad," he said aloud.

Out on the bay, another catas-
trophe just as improbable was
in progress.

Old Charlie Mack's Island
Queen had veered sharply off
course, left the darker-green stripe
of safe channel and plunged into
water too shallow for her draft.
The boat heeled on shoal sand,
listed and hung aground with

wind-filled sails holding her fast.

The Scoop that had surfaced
just behind her was so close that
Jeff wondered if its species' legen-
dary good nature had been mis-
represented. It floated like a
glistening plum-colored island,
flat dorsal flippers undulating
gently on the water and its great
filmy eyes all but closed against
the slanting glare of morning sun.

It was more than vast. The
thing must weigh, Jeff thought
dizzily, thousands or maybe mil-
lions of tons.

He thought he understood the

TRADERS RISK

113

Queen's grounding when he saw
the swimmer stroking urgently
toward his dock. Old Charlie had
abandoned his boat and was
swimming in to escape the Scoop.

But it wasn't Charlie. It was
Jennifer, Charlie's niece.

Jeff took the brown hand she
put up and drew her to the dock
beside her, steadying her while
she shook out her dripping red
hair and regained her breath.
Sea water had plastered Jennifer's
white blouse and knee-length
dungarees to her body like a sec-
ond skin, and the effect bordered
on the spectacular.

"Did you see it?" she de-
manded.

Jeff wrestled his eyes away to
the Scoop that floated like a
purple island in the bay.

"A proper monster," he said.
"You got out just in time."

She looked at once startled
and impatient. "Not the Scoop,
you idiot. The owl."

It was Jeffs turn to stare.

"Owl? There was one on the
dock, but I thought-"

"So did I." She sounded re-
lieved. "But if you saw one, too
. . . All of a sudden, it was stand-
ing there on deck beside me, right
out of nowhere. I lost my head
and grounded the Queen, and it
vanished. The owl, I mean."

"So did mine," Jeff said.

While they stood marveling,
the owls came back.

CHAFIS Three and Four were
horribly shaken by the initial
attempt at communication with
the natives. Nothing in Ciriimian
experience had prepared them for
creatures intelligent but illogical,
individually perceptive yet iso-
lated from each other.

"Communication by audible

symbol," Chafi Three said. He
ruffled his feathers in a shudder.
"Barbarous!"

"Atavistic," agreed Chafi Four.
"They could even lie to each
other."

But their dilemma remained.
They must warn the natives be-
fore the prowling Zid found them,
else there would be no natives.

"We must try again," Three
concluded, "searching out and
using the proper symbols for ex-
planation."

"Vocally," said Chafi Four.

They shuddered and tele-
ported.

* * *

THE SUDDEN reappearance of
his hallucination — doubled —
startled Jeff no more than the
fact that he seemed to be hold-
ing Jennifer Mack tightly. Amaz-
ingly, his immediate problem was
not the possibility of harm from
the owls, but whether he should
reassure Jennifer before or after
releasing her.

He compromised by leaving the
choice to her. "They can't be
dangerous," he said. "There are

114

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

TRADERS RISK

115

no land-dwelling predators on
Calaxia. I read that in — "

"Nothing like that ever hatched
out on Calaxia," said Jennifer. She
pulled free of him. "If they're real,
they came from somewhere else."

The implication drew a cold
finger down Jeff's spine. "That
would mean other cultures out
here. And in all our years of
planet-hunting, we haven't found

»

V

one.

Memory chilled him further.

"A ship landed inland a few
minutes ago," he said. "I took it
for an EI consulate craft, but it
could have been

The Ciriimians caught his men-
tal image of the landing and
intervened while common ground
offered.

"The ship was ours," said Chafi
Three. He had not vocalized since
fledgling days and his voice had
a jarring croak of disuse. "Our
Zid escaped its cage and de-
stroyed two of us, forcing us to
maroon it here for our own safety.
Unfortunately, we trusted our star
manual's statement that the
planet is unpopulated."

The Terrans drew together
again.

"Zid?" Jeff echoed.

Chafi Four relieved his fellow
of the strain by trying his own
rusty croak. "A vicious Canthor-
ian predator, combing the island
at this moment for prey. You
must help us to recapture it."

"So that you may identify it,"
Chafii Three finished helpfully,
"the Zid has this appearance."

His psi projection of the Zid
appeared on the dock before
them with demoniac abruptness
— crouched to leap, twin tails
lashing and its ten-foot length
bristling with glassy magenta
bristles. It had a lethal pair of
extra limbs that sprang from the
shoulders to end in taloned seiz-
ing-hands, and its slanted red eyes
burned malevolently from a
snouted, razor-fanged face.

It was too real to bear. Jeff
stepped back on suddenly unre-
liable legs. Jennifer fainted
against him and the unexpected
weight of her sent them both
sprawling to the dock.

"We lean on weak reeds," Chafi
Three said. "Creatures who col-
lapse with terror at the mere
projection of a Zid can be of
little assistance in recapturing

jj

one.

Chafi Four agreed reluctantly.
"Then we must seek aid else-
where."

W^HEN Jeff Aubray pulled
tT himself up from the plank-
ing, the apparitions were gone.
His knees shook and perspiration
crawled cold on his face, but he
managed to haul Jennifer up with
him.

"Come out of it, will you?" he
yelled ungallantly in her ear. "If

116

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

»

a thing like that is loose on the
island, we've got to get help!"

JENNIFER did not respond and
he slapped her, until her eyes
fluttered angrily.

"There's an EI communicator
in my cabin," Jeff said. "Let's

go

Memory lent Jennifer a sudden
vitality that nearly left Jeff be-
hind in their dash for the cottage
up the beach.

"The door," Jeff panted, in-
side. "Fasten the hurricane bolt.
Hurry."

While she secured the flimsy
door, he ripped through his be-
longings, aligning his EI commu-
nicator again on his breakfast
table. Finding out where the
islanders got their calm-crystals
had become suddenly unimpor-
tant; just then, he wanted nothing
so much as to see a well-armed
patrol ship nosing down out of
the Calaxian sunrise.

He was activating the screen
when Jennifer, in a magnificent
rage in spite of soaked blouse
and dungarees, advanced on him.

"You're an Earth Interests spy
after all," she accused. "They said
in the Township you are no artist,
but Uncle Charlie and I - "

Jeff made a pushing motion.
"Keep away from me. Do you
want that devil tearing the cabin
down around us?"

She fell quiet, remembering

the Zid, and he made his call.
"Aubray, Chain 147. Come in,

Consulate!"

There was a sound of stealthy
movement outside the cabin and
he flicked sweat out of his eyes
with a hand that shook.

"EI, for God's sake, come in!
I'm in trouble here!"

The image on his three-inch
screen was not Consul Satter-
field's but the startled consulate
operator's. "Trouble?"

Jeff forced stumbling words
into line. The EI operator shook
his head doubtfully.

"Consul's gone for the day,
Aubray. I'll see if I can reach
him."

"He was about to send out an
EI patrol ship to take over here
in the islands," Jeff said. "Tell
him to hurry it!"

He knew when he put down
the microphone that the ship
would be too late. EI might still
drag the secret of the calm-crystal
source out of the islanders, but
Jeff Aubray and Jennifer Mack
wouldn't be on hand to witness
their sorry triumph. The flimsy
cabin could not stand for long
against the sort of brute the owls
had shown him, and there was no
sort of weapon at hand. They
couldn't even run.

"There's something outside,"
Jennifer said in a small voice.

Her voice seemed to trigger
the attack.

TRADERS RISK

117

HPHE Zid lunged against the
•*■ door with a force that cracked
the wooden hurricane bolt across
and opened a three-inch slit be-
tween leading edge and lintel. Jeff
had a glimpse of slanted red eyes
and white-fanged snout before
reflex sent him headlong to
shoulder the door shut again.

"The bunk," he panted at Jen-
nifer. "Shove it over."

Between them, they wedged
the bunk against the door and
held it in place. Then they stood
looking palely at each other and
waiting for the next attack.

It came from a different quart-
er — the wide double windows
that overlooked the bay. The Zid,
rearing upright, smashed away
the flimsy rattan blinds with a
taloned seizing-hand and looked

<

redly in at them.

Like a man in a dream, Jeff
caught up his communicator from
the table and hurled it. The Zid
caught it deftly, sank glistening
teeth into the unit and demolished
it with a single snap.

Crushed, the rig's powerful
little battery discharged with a
muffled sputtering and flashing
of sparks. The Zid howled pierc-
ingly and dropped away from the
window.

That gave Jeff time enough to
reach the storm shutters and se-
cure them — only to rush again
with Jennifer to their bunk barri-
cade as the Zid promptly renewed

its ferocious attack on the door.

He flinched when Jennifer, to
be heard above the Zid's ragings,
shouted in his ear: "My Scoop
should have the Queen afloat by
now. Can we reach her?"

"Scoop?" The Zid's avid cries
discouraged curiosity before it
was well born. "We'd never make
it. We couldn't possibly outrun
that beast."

The Zid crashed against the
door and drove it inches ajar,
driving back their barricade. One
taloned paw slid in and slashed
viciously at random. Jeff ducked
and strained his weight against
the bunk, momentarily pinning
the Zid's threshing forelimb.

Chafi Three chose that moment
to reappear, nearly causing Jeff
to let go the bunk and admit the

Zid.

"Your female's suggestion is
right," the Ciriimian croaked. "The
Zid does not swim. Four and I
are arranging escape on that

premise."

The Zid's talons ripped through
the door, leaving parallel rows
of splintered breaks. Both slanted
red eyes glared in briefly.

"Then you'd damn well better
hurry," Jeff panted. The door,
he estimated, might — or might
not — hold for two minutes more.

The Ciriimian vanished. There
was a slithering sound in the dis-
tance that sounded like a moun-
tain in motion, and with it a ster-

118

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

torous grunting that all but
drowned out the Zid's cries. Some-
thing nudged the cottage with a
force that all but knocked it flat.

"My Scoop!" Jennifer
claimed. She let go the barricade
and ran to the window to throw
open the storm shutters. "Never
mind the door. This way, quick!"

CHE scrambled to the window
^sill and jumped. Numbly, Jeff
saw her suspended there, feet
only inches below the sill, appar-
ently on empty air. Then the door
sagged again under the Zid's lung-
ings and he left the bunk to
follow Jennifer.

He landed on something tough
and warm and slippery, a mon-
strous tail fluke that stretched
down the beach to merge into a
flat purplish acreage of back,
forested with endless rows of fins
and spines and enigmatic ten-
drils. The Scoop, he saw, and only
half believed it, had wallowed
into the shallows alongside his
dock. It had reversed its unbeliev-
able length to keep the head sub-
merged, and at the same time had
backed out of the water until its
leviathan tail spanned the hun-
dred-odd yards of sloping beach
from surf to cabin.

Just ahead of him, Jennifer
caught an erect fin-spine and
clung with both arms. "Hang on!
We're going — "

The Scoop contracted itself

with a suddenness that yanked
them yards from the cottage and
all but dislodged Jeff. Beyond the
surf, the shallows boiled whitely
where the Scoop fought for trac-
tion to draw its grounded bulk
into the water.

Jeff looked back once to see
the Zid close the distance be-
tween and spring upward to the
tail fluke behind him. He had an
instant conviction that the brute's
second spring would see him torn
to bits, but the Scoop at the mo-
ment found water deep enough
to move in earnest. The Zid could
only sink in all six taloned limbs

and hold fast.

The hundred-odd yards from
cabin to beach passed in a blur
of speed. The Scoop reached
deeper water and submerged,
throwing a mountainous billow
that sent the Island Queen reel-
ing and all but foundered her.

Jeff was dislodged instantly
and sank like a stone.

He came up, spouting water
and fighting for breath, to find
himself a perilous twenty feet
from the Zid. The Zid, utterly
out of its element, screamed hide-
ously and threshed water to froth,
all its earlier ferocity vanished
under the imminent and unfa-
miliar threat of drowning. Jeff
sank again and churned desper-
ately to put distance between

them.

He came up again, nearly

TRADERS RISK

119

strangled, to find that either he
or the Zid had halved the dis-
tance between them. They were
all but eye to eye when Jennifer
caught him and towed him away
toward the doubtful safety of the
Island Queen.

Chafis Three and Four ap-
peared from nowhere and stood
solemnly by while the Zid weak-
ened and sank with a final gout
of bubbles.

"We must have your friend's
help," Chafi Three said to Jen-
nifer then, "to recover our in-
vestment."

Jeff wheeled on him incredu-
lously. "Me go down there after
that monster? Not on your -

"He means the Scoop," Jen-
nifer said. "They brought it
ashore to help us out of the cabin.
Why shouldn't it help them
now?"

»

HE Scoop came up out of the
water so smoothly that the
Island Queen hardly rocked, dan-
gling the limp form of the Zid
from its great rubbery lips like a
drowned kitten.

"Here," Jennifer said.

The Scoop touched its vast
face to the Queen's rail and
dropped the unconscious body to
the deck. The Zid twitched weak-
ly and coughed up froth and
water.

Jeff backed away warily.
"Damn it, are we going through

all that again? Once it gets its
wind back — "

Chafi Three interrupted him
this time. "The crystal now. We
must have it to quiet the Zid
until it is safely caged again."

Jennifer turned suddenly firm.
"No. I won't let this EI informer
know about that."

The Ciriimians were firmer.

"It will not matter now. Galac-
tic Adjustment will extend aid to
both Calaxia and Terra, furnish-
ing substitutes for the crystals
you deal in. There will be no loss
to either faction."

"No loss?" Jennifer repeated
indignantly. "But then there won't
be any demand for our crystals!
We'll lose everything we've
gained."

"Not so," Chafi Three assured
her. "Galactic will offer satis-
factory items in exchange, as well
as a solution to Terra's problems."

The Scoop, sensing Jennifer's
surrender, slid its ponderous bulk
nearer and opened its mouth,
leaving half an acre of lower jaw
resting flush with the Island
Queen's deck. Without hesitation,
Jennifer stepped over the rail and
vanished into the yawning pink-
ish cavern beyond.

Appalled, Jeff rushed after her.
"Jennifer! Have you lost your
mind?"

"There is no danger," Chafi
Three assured him. "Scoops are
benevolent as well as intelligent,

120

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

and arrived long ago at a work-
ing agreement with the islanders.
This one has produced a crystal
and is ready to be relieved of it,
else it would not have attached
itself to a convenient human."

Jeff said dizzily, "The Scoops
make the crystals?"

"There is a nidus just back of
a fleshy process in its throat,
corresponding to your own ton-
sils, which produces a crystal
much as your Terran oyster se-
cretes a pearl. The irritation dis-
tracts the Scoops from their medi-
tations — they are a philosophical
species, though not mechanically
progressive — and prompts them
to barter their strength for a
time to be rid of it."

JENNIFER reappeared with a
walnut-sized crystal in her
hand and vaulted across the rail.
"There goes another Scoop," she

said resignedly. "The Queen will
have to tack with the wind for a
while until another one shows up."
"So that's why your sails bellied
backward when you came in to
harbor," said Jeff. "The thing was
towing you."

A thin, high streak of vapor-
trail needling down toward them
from the sunrise rainbow turned
the channel of his thought.

"That will be Satterfield and
his task force," Jeff told the
Chafis. "1 think you're going to
find yourselves in an argument

over that matter of squeezing
Terra out of the crystal trade."

They reassured him solemnly.

"Terra has no real need of the
crystals. We can offer a tested
genetics program that will elimi-
nate racial anxiety within a few
generations, and supply neural
therapy equipment — on a trade
basis, of course — that will serve
the crystals' purpose during the
interim."

There should be a flaw some-
where, Jeff felt, but he failed to
see one. He gave up trying when
he found Jennifer eying him with
uncharacteristic uncertainty.
. "You'll be glad to get back to
your patrol work," she said. It had
an oddly tentative sound.

Somehow the predictable mo-
notony of consulate work had
never seemed less inviting. The
prospect of ending his Calaxian
tour and going back to a half-
barren and jittery Earth appealed

to Jeff even less.

"No," he said. "I'd like to stay."

"There's nothing to do but fish
and sail around looking for Scoops
ready to shed their crystals,"
Jennifer reminded him. "Still,
Uncle Charlie has talked about
settling in the Township and
standing for Council election. Can
you fish and sail, Jeff Aubray?"

The consulate rocket landed
ashore, but Jeff ignored it.

"I can learn," he said.

— ROGER

TRADERS RISK

121

Gr

■

t *

y

eward

of Dreams

By H. BEAM PIPER

Despite Mr. Shakespeare,

wealth and name

are both dross compared with

the theft of hope

and Maxwell had to rob

a whole planet of if!

TANDING at the armor-
glass front of the observa-
tion deck and watching
the mountains rise and grow on
the horizon, Conn Maxwell
gripped the metal hand-rail with

*

painful intensity, as though try-
ing to hold back the airship by
force. Thirty minutes— twenty-six
and a fraction of the Terran
minutes he had become accus-
tomed to— until he'd have to face
it.

Then, realizing that he never,
in his own thoughts, addressed

Illustrated by DILLON

122

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

GRAVEYARD OF DREAMS

123

himself as "sir," he turned.

"I beg your pardon?"

It was the first officer, wearing
a Terran Federation Space Navy
uniform of forty years, or about
ten regulation-changes, ago. That
was the sort of thing he had taken
for granted before he had gone
away. Now he was noticing it
everywhere.

"Thirty minutes out of Litch-
field, sir," the ship's officer re-
peated. "You'll go off by the mid-
ship gangway on the starboard
side."

"Yes, I know. Thank you."

The first mate held out the clip-
board he was carrying. "Would
you mind checking over this, Mr.
Maxwell? Your baggage list."

"Certainly." He glanced at the
slip of paper. Valises, eighteen and
twenty-five kilos, two; trunks,
S3venty-five and seventy kilos,
two; microbook case, one-fifty
kilos, one. The last item fanned
up a little flicker of anger in him,
not at any person, even himself,
but at the situation in which he

found himself and the futility of
the whole thing.

"Yes, that's everything. I have

no hand-luggage, just this stuff."

H

E noticed that this was the
only baggage list under the
clip; the other papers were all
freight and express manifests.
"Not many passengers left aboard,
are there?"

"You're the only one in first-
class, sir," the mate replied. "About
forty farm-laborers on the lower
deck. Everybody else got off at
the other stops. Litchfield's the end
of the run. You know anything
about the place?"

"I was born there. I've been
away at school for the last five
years."

"On Baldur?"

"Terra. University of Monte-
video." Once Conn would have said
it almost boastfully.

The mate gave him a quick look
of surprised respect, then grinned
and nodded. "Of course; I should
have known. You're Rodney Max-
well's son, aren't you? Your
father's one of our regular freight
shippers. Been sending out a lot
of stuff lately." He looked as
though he would have liked to con-
tinue the conversation, but said:
"Sorry, I've got to go. Lot of things
to attend to before landing." He
touched the visor of his cap and
turned away.

The mountains were closer
when Conn looked forward again,
and he glanced down. Five years
and two space voyages ago, seen
from the afterdeck of this ship or
one of her sisters, the woods had
been green with new foliage, and
the wine-melon fields had been in
pink blossom. He tried to picture
the scene sliding away below in-
stead of drawing in toward him, as
though to force himself back to a

124

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

moment of the irretrievable past.
But the moment was gone, and
with it the eager excitement and
the half-formed anticipations of
the things he would learn and ac-
complish on Terra. The things he
would learn— microbook case, one-
fifty kilos, one. One of the steel
trunks was full of things he had
learned and accomplished, too.
Maybe they, at least, had some
value

* •

The woods were autumn-tinted
now and the fields were bare and
brown.

They had gotten the crop in
early this year, for the fields had
all been harvested. Those workers
below must be going out for the
wine-pressing. That extra hands
were needed for that meant a big
crop, and yet it seemed that less
land was under cultivation than

*

when he had gone away. He could
see squares of low brush among
the new forests that had grown up
in the last forty years, and the few
stands of original timber looked
like hills above the second growth.
Those trees had been standing
when the planet had been colo-
nized.

FUNNY how much was coming
back to him now — things he
had picked up from the minimal
liberal-arts and general-humanities
courses he had taken and then
forgotten in his absorption with
the science and tech studies.

The first extrasolar planets, as
they had been discovered, had
been named from Norse mytholo-
gy—Odin and Baldur and Thor,
Uller and Freya, Bifrost and As-
gard and Niflheim. When the
Norse names ran out, the discov-
erers had turned to other mytholo-
gies, Celtic and Egyptian and Hin-
du and Assyrian, and by the
middle of the Seventh Century
they were naming planets for al-
most anything.

Anything, that is, but actual per-
sons; their names were reserved
for stars. Like Alpha Gartner, the
sun of Poictesme, and Beta Gart-
ner, a buckshot-sized pink glow in
the southeast, and Gamma Gart-
ner, out of sight on the other side
of the world, all named for old
Genji Gartner, the scholarly and
half-piratical adventurer whose
ship had been the first to approach
the three stars and discover that

That had been two hundred each of them had planets.

years ago, at the middle of the
Seventh Century, Atomic Era. The
name of the planet— Poictesme—
told that: the Surromanticist
Movement, when the critics and
professors were rediscovering
James Branch Cabell.

Forty-two planets in all, from a
couple of methane-giants on Gam-
ma to airless little things with one-
sixth Terran gravity. Alpha II had
been the only one in the Trisys-
tem with an oxygen atmosphere
and life. So Gartner had landed

GRAVEYARD OF DREAMS

125

on it, and named it Poictesme, and
the settlement that had grown up
around the first landing site had
been called Storisende. Thirty
years later, Genji Gartner died
there, after seeing the camp grow
to a metropolis, and was buried
under a massive monument.

Some of the other planets had
been rich in metals, and mines had
been opened, and atmosphere-
domed factories and processing
plants built. None of them could
produce anything but hydroponic
and tissue-culture foodstuffs, and
natural foods from Poictesme had
been less expensive, even on the
planets of Gamma and Beta. So
Poictesme had concentrated on
agriculture and grown wealthy at
it.

Then, within fifty years of Genji
Gartner's death, the economics of
interstellar trade overtook the Tri-
system and the mines and fac-
tories closed down. It was no
longer possible to ship the output
to a profitable market, in the face
of the growing self-sufficiency of
the colonial planets and the irre-
ducibly high cost of space-freight-
ing.

Below, the brown fields and the
red and yellow woods were merg-
ing into a ten-mile-square desert
of crumbling concrete— empty and
roofless sheds and warehouses and
barracks, brush-choked parade
grounds and landing fields, airship
docks, and even a spaceport. They

were more recent, dating from
Poictesme's second brief and hec-
tic prosperity, when the Terran
Federation's Third Fleet-Army
Force had occupied the Gartner
Trisystem during the System
States War.

M

ILLIONS of troops had been
stationed on or routed
through Poictesme; tens of thou-
sands of spacecraft had been based
on the Trisystem; the mines and
factories had reopened for war
production. The Federation had
spent trillions of sols on Poictesme,
piled up mountains of stores and
arms and equipment, left the face
of the planet cluttered with in-
stallations.

Then, ten years before anybody

had expected it, the rebellious
System States Alliance had col-
lapsed and the war had ended.
The Federation armies had gone
home, taking with them the
clothes they stood in, their per-
sonal weapons and a few sou-
venirs. Everything else had been
left behind; even the most ex-
pensive equipment was worth less
than the cost of removal.

Ever since, Poictesme had been
living on salvage. The uniform the
first officer was wearing was forty
years old— and it was barely a
month out of the original pack-
ing. On Terra, Conn had told his
friends that his father was a pros-
pector and let them interpret that

126

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

as meaning an explorer for, say,
uranium deposits. Rodney Max-
well found plenty of uranium, but
he got it by taking apart the war-
heads of missiles.

The old replacement depot or
classification center or training
area or whatever it had been had
vanished under the ship now and
it was all forest back to the
mountains, with an occasional
cluster of deserted buildings. From
one or two, threads of blue smoke
rose— bands of farm tramps, camp-
ing on their way from harvest to
wine-pressing. Then the eastern
foothills were out of sight and he
was looking down on the granite
spines of the Calder Range; the
valley beyond was sloping away
and widening out in the distance,
and it was time he began think-
ing of what to say when he landed.

He would have to tell them, of
course. x

He wondered who would be at
the dock to meet him, besides
his family. Lynne Fawzi, he hoped.
Or did he? Her parents would be
with her, and Kurt Fawzi would
take the news hardest of any of
them, and be the first to blame
him because it was bad. The hopes
he had built for Lynne and him-
self would have to be held in

THE ship swept on, tearing
through the thin puffs of cloud
at ten miles a minute. Six minutes
to landing. Five. Four. Then he
saw the river bend, glinting redly
through the haze in the sunlight;
Litchfield was inside it, and he
stared waiting for the first glimpse
of the city. Three minutes, and the
ship began to cut speed and lose
altitude. The hot- jets had stopped
firing and he could hear the whine
of the cold- jet rotors.

Then he could see Litchfield,
dominated by the Airport Build-
ing, so thick that it looked squat
for all its height, like a candle-

*

stump in a puddle of its own
grease, the other buildings under
their carapace of terraces and
landing stages seeming to have
flowed away from it. And there
was the yellow block of the dis-
tilleries, and High Garden Ter-
race, and the Mall . . .

At first, in the distance, it looked
like a living city. Then, second by
second, the stigmata of decay be-
came more and more evident. Ter-
races empty or littered with rub-
bish; ' gardens untended and
choked with wild growth; win-
dows staring blindly; walls
splotched with lichens and grimy
where the rains could not wash

abeyance till he saw how her them.

father would regard him now.
But however any of them took

it, he would have to tell them the
truth.

For a moment, he was afraid
that some disaster, unmentioned in
his father's letters, had befallen.
Then he realized that the change

GRAVEYARD OF DREAMS

127

had not been in Litchfield but in where the guns had been— came

himself. After five years, he was
seeing it as it really was. He won-
dered how his family and his
friends would look to him now.
Or Lynne.

The ship was coming in over
the Mall; he could see the cracked
paving sprouting grass, the statues
askew on their pedestals, the
waterless fountains. He thought
for an instant that one of them
was playing, and then he saw that
what he had taken for spray was
dust blowing from the empty basin.
There was something about dusty
fountains, something he had
learned at the University. Oh, yes.
One of the Second Century Mar-
tian Colonial poets, Eirrarsson, or
somebody like that:

The fountains are dusty in the
Graveyard of Dreams;

The hinges are rusty and swing
with tiny screams.

There was more to it, but he
couldn't remember; something
about empty gardens under an
empty sky. There must have been
colonies inside the Sol System, be-
fore the Interstellar Era, that
hadn't turned out any better than
Poictesme. Then he stopped try-
ing to remember as the ship turned
toward the Airport Building and
a couple of tugs— Terran Federa-
tion contragravity tanks, with der-
rick-booms behind and push-poles

up to bring her down.

He walked along the starboard
promenade to the gangway, which
the first mate and a couple of air-
men were getting open.

M

OST of the population of
top-level Litchfield was in
the crowd on the dock. He recog-
nized old Colonel Zareff, with his
white hair and plum-brown skin,
and Tom Brangwyn, the town
marshal, red-faced and bulking
above the others. It took a few
seconds for him to pick out his
father and mother, and his sister
Flora, and then to realize that the
handsome young man beside Flora
was his brother Charley. Charley
had been thirteen when Conn had

gone away. And there was Kurt
Fawzi, the mayor of Litchfield,
and there was Lynne, beside him,
her red-lipped face tilted upward
with a cloud of bright hair behind
it.

He waved to her, and she waved
back, jumping in excitement, and
then everybody was waving, and
they were pushing his family to
the front and making way for
them.

The ship touched down lightly
and gave a lurch as she went off
contragravity, and they got the
gangway open and the steps swung
out, and he started down toward
the people who had gathered to
greet him.

128

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

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GRAVEYARD OF DREAMS

129

His father was wearing the same
black best-suit he had worn when
they had parted five years ago. It
had been new then; now it was
shabby and had acquired a per-
manent wrinkle across the right
hip, over the pistol-butt. Charley
was carrying a gun, too; the belt
and holster looked as though he
had made them himself. His

*

mother's dress was new and so
was Flora's— probably made for
the occasion. He couldn't be sure
just which of the Terr an Federa-
tion services had provided the
material, but Charley's shirt was
Medical Service sterilon.

Ashamed that he was noticing
and thinking of such things at a
time like this, he clasped his
father's hand and kissed his
mother and Flora. Everybody was
talking at once, saying things that
he heard only as happy sounds.
His brother's words were the first
that penetrated as words.

"You didn't know me," Charley
was accusing. "Don't deny it; I
saw you standing there wondering
if I was Flora's new boy friend
or what."

"Well, how in Niflheim'd you
expect me to? You've grown up
since the last time I saw you.
You're looking great, kid!" He
caught the gleam of Lynne's
golden hair beyond Charley's
shoulder and pushed him gently
aside. "Lynne!"

"Conn, you look just wonder-

ful!" Her arms were around his
neck and she was kissing him. "Am
I still your girl, Conn?"

He crushed her against him and
returned her kisses, assuring her
that she was. He wasn't going to
let it make a bit of difference how
her father took the news— if she
didn't.

She babbled on: "You didn't
get mixed up with any of those
girls on Terra, did you? If you
did, don't tell me about it. All I
care about is that you're back.
Oh, Conn, you don't know how
much I missed you . . . Mother,
Dad, doesn't he look just splen-
did?"

K

URT Fawzi, a little thinner,
his face more wrinkled, his
hair grayer, shook his hand.

"I'm just as glad to see you as
anybody, Conn," he said, "even if
I'm not being as demonstrative
about it as Lynne. Judge, what
do you think of our returned wan-
derer? Franz, shake hands with
him, but save the interview for
the News for later. Professor,
here's one student Litchfield
Academy won't need to be
ashamed of."

He shook hands with them—
old Judge Ledue; Franz Veltrin,
the newsman; Professor Kellton;
a dozen others, some of whom he
had not thought of in five years.
They were all cordial and happy
—how much, he wondered, be-

130

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

cause he was their neighbor, Conn
Maxwell, Rodney Maxwell's son,
home from Terra, and how much
because of what they hoped he
would tell them? Kurt Fawzi, edg-
ing him out of the crowd, was the
first to voice that.

"Conn, what did you find out?"
he asked breathlessly. "Do you
know where it is?"

Conn hesitated, looking about
desperately; this was no time to
start talking to Kurt Fawzi about
it. His father was turning toward
him from one side, and from the
other Tom Brangwyn and Colonel
Zareff were approaching more
slowly, the older man leaning on
a silver-headed cane.

"Don't bother him about it now,
Kurt," Rodney Maxwell scolded
the mayor. "He's just gotten off
the ship; he hasn't had time to
say hello to everybody yet."

"But, Rod, I've been waiting
to hear what he's found out ever
since he went away," Fawzi pro-
tested in a hurt tone.

Brangwyn and Colonel Zareff
joined them. They were close
friends, probably because neither
of them was a native of Poictesme.

The town marshal had always
been reticent about his origins,
but Conn guessed it was Hathor.
Brangwyn's heavy-muscled body,
and his ease and grace in handling
it, marked him as a man of a high-
gravity planet. Besides, Hathor
had a permanent cloud-envelope,

and Tom Brangwyn's skin had
turned boiled-lobster red under the*
dim orange sunlight of Alpha
Gartner.

Old Klem Zareff never hesi-
tated to tell anybody where he
came from — he was from Ash-
modai, one of the System States
planets, and he had commanded
a division that had been blasted
down to about regimental strength,
in the Alliance army.

"Hello, boy," he croaked, ex-
tending a trembling hand. "Glad
you're home. We all missed you."

"We sure did, Conn," the town
marshal agreed, clasping Conn's
hand as soon as the old man had
released it. "Find out anything
definite?"

Kurt Fawzi looked at his watch.
"Conn, we've planned a little cele-
bration for you. We only had since
day before yesterday, when the
spaceship came into radio range,
but we're having a dinner party
for you at Senta's this evening."

"You couldn't have done any-
thing I'd have liked better, Mr.
Fawzi. I'd have to have a meal at
Senta's before really feeling that
I'd come home."

"Well, here's what I have in
mind. It'll be three hours till din-
ner's ready. Suppose we all go up
to my office in the meantime. It'll
give the ladies a chance to go
home and fix up for the party,
and we can have a drink and a
talk."

GRAVEYARD OF DREAMS

131

"You want to do that, Conn?"
his father asked, a trifle doubt-
fully. "If you'd rather go home
first . . » ■

SOMETHING in his father's
voice and manner disturbed
him vaguely; however, he nodded
agreement. After a couple of
drinks, he'd be better able to tell
them.

"Yes, indeed, Mr. Fawzi," Conn
said. "I know you're all anxious,
but it's a long story. This'll be a
good chance to tell you."

Fawzi turned to his wife and
daughter, interrupting himself to
shout instructions to a couple of
dockhands who were floating the
baggage off the ship on a con-
tragravity-lifter. Conn's father had
sent Charley off with a message
to his mother and Flora.

Conn turned to Colonel Zareff.
"I noticed extra workers coming
out from the hiring agencies in
Storisende, and the crop was all
in across the Calders. Big wine-
pressing this year?"

"Yes, we're up to our necks in
melons," the old planter grumbled.
"Gehenna of a big crop. Price'll
drop like a brick of collapsium,
and this time next year we'll be
using brandy to wash our feet in."

"If you can't get good prices,
hang onto it and age it. I wish
you could see what the bars on

"This isn't Terra and we aren't
selling it by the drink. Only place
we can sell brandy is at Stori-
sende spaceport, and we have to
take what the trading-ship cap-
tains offer. You've been on a rich
planet for the last five years, Conn.
You've forgotten what it's like to
live in a poorhouse. And thafs what
Poictesme is."

"Things'll be better from now
on, Klem," the mayor said, putting
one hand on the old man's shoul-
der and the other on Conn's. "Our
boy's home. With what he can tell
us, we'll be able to solve all our
problems. Come on, lefs go up
and hear about it."

They entered the wide door-
way of the warehouse on the dock-
level floor of the Airport Build-
ing and crossed to the lift. About
a dozen others had joined them,
all the important men of Lichfield.
Inside, Kurt Fawzi's laborers were
floating out cargo for the ship—
casks of brandy, of course, and a
lot of boxes and crates painted
light blue and marked with the
wreathed globe of the Terr an Fed-
eration and the gold triangle of
the Third Fleet-Army Force and
the eight-pointed red star of Ord-
nance Service. Long cases of rifles,
square boxes of ammunition, ma-
chine guns, crated auto-cannon and
rockets.

"Where'd that stuff come from?"

Terra charge for a drink of ten- Conn asked his father. "You dig it

year-old Poictesme."

up:

?»

132

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

TTIS father chuckled. "That hap-
-*•-*• pened since the last time I
wrote you. Remember the big un-
derground headquarters complex
in the Calders? Everybody thought
it had been all cleaned out years
ago. You know, it's never a mis-
take to take a second look at
anything that everybody believes.
I found a lot of sealed-off sections
over there that had never been en-
tered. This stuff's from one of the
headquarters defense armories. I
have a gang getting the stuff out.
Charley and I flew in after lunch,
and I'm going back the first thing
tomorrow."

"But there's enough combat
equipment on hand to outfit a
private army for every man, wom-
an and child on Poictesme!"
Conn objected. "Where are we
going to sell this?"

"Storisende spaceport. The
tramp freighters are buying it for
newly colonized planets that
haven't been industrialized yet.
They don't pay much, but it
doesn't cost much to get it out,
and I've been clearing about three
hundred sols a ton on the space-
port docks. That's not bad, you
know."

Three hundred sols a ton. A
lifter went by stacked with cases
of M-504 submachine guns. Un-
loaded, one of them weighed six
pounds, and even a used one was
worth a hundred sols. Conn started

then they came to the lift and were
crowding onto it.

He had been in Kurt Fawzi's
office a few times, always with
his father, and he remembered it
as a dim, quiet place of genteel
conviviality and rambling con-
versations, with deep, comfortable
chairs and many ashtrays. Fawzi's
warehouse and brokerage business,
and the airline agency, and the
government, such as it was, of
Litchfield, combined, made few de-
mands on his time and did not
prevent the office from being a
favored loafing center for the
town's elders. The lights were
bright only over the big table that
served, among other things, as a
desk, and the walls were almost
invisible in the shadows.

As they came down the hall-
way from the lift, everybody had
begun speaking more softly. Voices
were never loud or excited in
Kurt Fawzi's office.

Tom Brangwyn went to the
table, taking off his belt and hol-
ster and laying his pistol aside.
The others, crowding into the
room, added their weapons to his.

That was something else Conn
was seeing with new eyes. It had
been five years since he had car-
ried a gun and he was wondering
why any of them bothered. A gun
was what a boy put on to show
that he had reached manhood,
and a man carried for the rest of

to say something about that, but his life out of habit.

GRAVEYARD OF DREAMS

133

Why, there wouldn't be a shoot-
ing a year in Litchfield, if you
didn't count the farm tramps and
drifters, who kept to the lower

»

level or camped in the empty
buildings at the edge of town. Or
maybe that was it; maybe Litch-
field was peaceful because every-
body was armed. It certainly
wasn't because of anything the
Planetary Government at Stori-
sende did to maintain order.

AFTER divesting himself of his
gun, Tom Brangwyn took
over the bartending, getting out
glasses and filling a pitcher of
brandy from a keg in the corner.

"Everybody supplied?" Fawzi
was asking. "Well, let's drink to
our returned emissary. We're all
anxious to hear what you found
out, Conn. Gentlemen, here's to
our friend Conn Maxwell. Wel-
come home, Conn!"

"Well, it's wonderful to be back,
Mr. Fawzi—"

"No, let's not have any of this
mister foolishness! You're one of
the gang now. And drink up, every-
body. We have plenty of brandy,
even if we don't have anything
else."

"You telling us, Kurt?" some-
body demanded. One of the dis-
tillery company; the name would
come back to Conn in a moment.
"When this crop gets pressed and
fermented—"

know where in Gehenna I'm go-
ing to vat the stuff till it ferments,"
Colonel Zareff said. "Or why. You
won't be able to handle all of it."

"Now, now!" Fawzi reproved.
"Let's not start moaning about our
troubles. Not the day Conn's come
home. Not when he's going to tell
us how to find the Third Fleet-
Army Force Brain."

"You did find out where the
Brain is, didn't you, Conn?" Brang-
wyn asked anxiously.

That set half a dozen of them
off at once. They had all sat down

after the toast; now they were

fidgeting in their chairs, leaning

forward, looking at Conn fixedly.

"What did you find out, Conn?"

*

"It's still here on Poictesme,
isn't it?"

"Did you find out where it is?"

He wanted to tell them in one
quick sentence and get it over
with. He couldn't, any more than
he could force himself to squeeze
the trigger of a pistol he knew
would blow up in his hand.

"Wait a minute, gentlemen." He
finished the brandy, and held out
the glass to Tom Brangwyn, nod-
ding toward the pitcher. Even the
first drink had warmed him and
he could feel the constriction eas-
ing in his throat and the lump at
the pit of his stomach dissolving.
"I hope none of you expect me
to spread out a map and show you
the cross on it, where the Brain

"When I start pressing, I don't is. I can't. I can't even give the

134

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

"The main purpose in my go-
ing to the University was to learn
computer theory and practice. It
wouldn't do any good for us to
find the Brain if none of us are
able to use it. Well, I learned
enough to be able to operate, pro-
gram and service any computer in

■

existence, and train assistants.
During my last year at the Uni-
versity, I had a part-time paid job
programming the big positron-neu-

■

trino-photon computer in the astro-
physics department. When I grad-
uated, I was offered a position as
instructor in positronic computer
theory."

"You never mentioned that in

I

ONN finished his second drink, your letters, son," his father said.

approximate location of the thing."

Much of the happy eagerness

drained out of the faces around

him. Some of them were looking

troubled; Colonel Zareff was
gnawing the bottom of his mus-
tache, and Judge Ledue's hand
shook as he tried to relight his
cigar. Conn stole a quick side-
glance at his father; Rodney Max-
well was watching him curiously,
as though wondering what he was
going to say next.

"But it is still here on Poic-
tesme?" Fawzi questioned. "They
didn't take it away when they
evacuated, did they?"

This time he picked up the
pitcher and refilled for himself.

arr

I'm going to have to do a lot
of talking," he said, "and it's going
to be thirsty work. I'll have to tell
you the whole thing from the be- catch in old Professor Kellton's

"It was too late for any letter
except one that would come on the
same ship I did. Beside, it wasn't
very important."

*

"I think it was." There was a

ginning, and if you start asking
questions at random, you'll get me
mixed up and I'll miss the im-
portant points."

"By all means!" Judge Ledue
told him. "Give it in your own
words, in what you think is the

t

proper order."

"Thank you, Judge."

Conn drank some more brandy,
hoping he could get his courage up
without getting drunk. After all,
they had a right to a full report;
all of them had contributed some-

voice. "One of my boys, from the
Academy, offered a place on the
faculty of the University of Mon-
tevideo, on Terra!" He poured
himself a second drink, something
he almost never did.

"Conn means it wasn't impor-
tant because it didn't have any-
thing to do with the Brain," Faw-
zi explained and then looked at
Conn expectantly.

All right; now he'd tell them.
"I went over all the records of the
Third Fleet-Army Force's occu-

thing toward sending him to Terra, pation of Poictesme that are open

GRAVEYARD OF DREAMS

135

to the public. On one pretext or
another, I got permission to
examine the non-classified files
that aren't open to public exami-
nation. I even got a few peeps at
some Of the stuff that's still clas-
sified secret. I have maps and
plans of all the installations that
were built on this planet— literal-
ly thousands of them, many still
undiscovered. Why, we haven't
more than scratched the surface of
what the Federation left behind
here. For instance, all the im-
portant installations exist in dupli-
cate, some even in triplicate, as a

precaution against Alliance space
attack."

??

PACE attack!" Colonel Za-

reff was indignant. "There
never was a time when the Alli-
ance could have taken the offen-
sive against Poictesme, even if
an offensive outside our own space-
area had been part of our policy.
We just didn't have the ships. It
took over a year to move a million
and a half troops from Ashmodai
to Marduk, and the fleet that was
based on Amaterasu was blasted
out of existence in the spaceports
and in orbit. Hell, at the time of
the surrender, we didn't have—"

"They weren't taking chances
on that, Colonel. But the point
I want to make is that with every-
thing I did find, I never found, in
any official record, a single word
about the giant computer we call

the Third Fleet-Army Force
Brain."

For a time, the only sound in
the room was the tiny insectile
humming of the electric clock on
the wall. Then Professor Kellton
set his glass on the table, and it

sounded like a hammer-blow.

"Nothing, Conn?" Kurt Fawzi
was incredulous and, for the first
time, frightened. The others were
exchanging uneasy glances. "But
you must have! A thing like that—"

"Of course it would be one of
the closest secrets during the war,"
somebody else said. "But in forty
years, you'd expect something to
leak out."

"Why, during the war, it was all
through the Third Force. Even the
Alliance knew about it; that's how
Klem heard of it."

"Well, Conn couldn't just walk
into the secret files and read what-
ever he wanted to. Just because he
couldn't find anything-

"Don't tell me about security!"
Klem Zareff snorted. "Certainly
they still have it classified; staff-
brass'd rather lose an eye than
declassify anything. If you'd seen
the lengths our staff went to— hell,
we lost battles because the staff
wouldn't release information the
troops in the field needed. I re-
member once—"

"But there was a Brain," Judge
Ledue was saying, to reassure him-
self and draw agreement from the
others. "It was capable of com*

j>

136

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTIOf^

bining data, and scanning and
evaluating all its positronic memo-
ries, and forming association pat-
terns, and reasoning with absolute
perfection. It was more than a
positronic brain— it was a posi-
tronic super-mind."

"We'd have won the war, ex-
cept for the Brain. We had ninety
systems, a hundred and thirty in-
habited planets, a hundred billion
people— and we were on the de-
fensive in our own space-area!
Every move we made was known
and anticipated by the Federation.
How could they have done that
without something like the Brain?"

"Conn, from what you learned
of computers, how large a volume
of space would you say the Brain
would have to occupy?" Profes-
sor Kellton asked.

ROFESSOR Kellton was the
most unworldly of the lot,
yet he was asking the most prac-
tical question.

"Well, the astrophysics com-
puter I worked with at the Univer-
sity occupies a total of about one
million cubic feet," Conn began.
This was his chance; they'd take
anything he told them about com-
puters as gospel. "It was only de-
signed to handle problems in astro-
physics. The Brain, being built for
space war, would have to handle
any such problem. And if half the
stories about the Brain are any-
where near true, it handled any

other problem—mathematical, sci-
entific, political, economic, strategic,
psychological, even philosophical
and ethical. Well, I'd say that a
hundred million cubic feet would
be the smallest even conceivable."

They all nodded seriously. They
were willing to accept that— or
anything else, except one thing.

"Lot of places on this planet
where a thing that size could be
hidden," Tom Brangwyn said, un-
dismayed. "A planet's a mighty big
place."

"It could be under water, in one
of the seas," Piet Dawes, the
banker, suggested. "An under-

*

water dome city wouldn't be any
harder to build than a dome city
on a poison-atmosphere planet like
Tubal-Cain."

"It might even be on Tubal-
Cain," a melon-planter said. "Or
Hiawatha, or even one of the Beta
or Gamma planets. The Third
Force was occupying the whole
Trisystem, you know." He thought
for a moment. "If I'd been in
charge, I'd have put it on one of
the moons of Pantagruel."

"But that's clear out in the
Alpha System," Judge Ledue ob-
jected. "We don't have a space-
ship on the planet, certainly
nothing with a hyperdrive engine.
And it would take a lifetime to
get out to the Gamma System and
back on reaction drive."

Conn put his empty brandy
glass on the table and sat erect.

GRAVEYARD OF DREAMS

137

A new thought had occurred to
him, chasing out of his mind all
the worries and fears he had
brought with him all the way from
Terra.

"Then we'll have to build a
ship," he said calmly. "I know,
when the Federation evacuated
Poictesme, they took every hyper-
drive ship with them. But they had
plenty of shipyards and spaceports
on this planet, and I have maps
showing the location of all of them,
and barely a third of them have
been discovered so far. I'm sure

we can find enough hulks, and
enough hyperfield generator parts,
to assemble a ship or two, and I
know we'll find the same or better
on some of the other planets.

"And here's another thing," he
added. "When we start looking
into some of the dome-city plants
on Tubal -Cain and Hiawatha and
Moruna and Koshchei, we may
find the plant or plants where the
components for the Brain were
fabricated, and if we do, we may
find records of where they were
shipped, and that'll be it."

138

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

?<? X7" OU'RE right!" Professor
•*- Kellton cried, quivering with
excitement. "We've been hunting
at random for the Brain, so it
would only be an accident if we
found it. We'll have to do this sys-
tematically, and with Conn to help
us— Conn, why not build a com-
puter? I don't mean another Brain;
I mean a computer to help us
find the Brain."

"We can, but we may not even
need to build one. When we get
out to the industrial planets, we
may find one ready except for

perhaps some minor alterations.'*'
"But how are we going to fi«
all this?" Klem Zareff

"We're

nance

demanded querulously.

poorer than snakes, and even one

hyperdrive ship's going to cost

like Gehenna."

«T>.

I've been thinking about that,
Klem," Fawzi said. "If we can find
material at these shipyards Conn
knows about, most of our expense
will be labor. Well, haven't we ten
workmen Competing for every job?
They don't really need money,
only the things money can buy.

: v-2&

■■■■ *v"v-&;#«?»:

:■■ ■■'"■■:,■ ■

. ■ V. .

jft ' ■>■>■:.■ ■•■£*:• />»

m :

GRAVEYARD OF DREAMS

139

We can raise food on the farms

and provide whatever else they

need out of Federation supplies."

"Sure. As soon as it gets around

*

that we're really trying to do
something about this, everybody'll
want in on it," Tom Brangwyn
predicted.

"And I have no doubt that the
Planetary Government at Stori-
sende will give us assistance, once
we show that this is a practical
and productive enterprise," Judge
Ledue put in. "I have some slight
influence with the President and—"

"You leaving us, Rod?"
"Yes, it's getting late. Conn and
I are going for a little walk; we'll
be at Senta's in half an hour. The
fresh air will do both of us good
and we have a lot to talk about.
After all, we haven't sefen each
other for over five years."

tiTf

I'm not too sure we want the
Government getting into this,"
Kurt Fawzi replied. "Give them
half a chance and that gang at
Storisende'll squeeze us right out."

HEY were silent, however, un-
til they were away from the
Airport Building and walking along
High Garden Terrace in the direc-
tion of the Mall. Conn was glad;
his own thoughts were weighing
too heavily within him : I didn't do
it. I was going to do it; every
minute, I was going to do it, and
I didn't, and now it's too late.
"That was quite a talk you gave

"We can handle this ourselves," them, son," his father said. "They

Brangwyn agreed. "And when we
get some kind of a ship and get out
to the other two systems, or even
just to Tubal-Cain or Hiawatha,
first thing you know, we'll be the
Planetary Government."

"Well, now, Tom," Fawzi began
piously, "the Brain is too big a
thing for a few of us to try to
monopolize; it'll be for all Poic-
tesme. Of course, it's only proper
that we, who are making the effort
to locate it, should have the direc-
tion of that effort . . ."

While Fawzi was talking, Rod-
ney Maxwell went to the table,
rummaged his pistol out of the
pile and buckled it on. The mayor
stopped short.

believed every word of it. A couple
of times, I even caught myself
starting to believe it."

Conn stopped short. His father
stopped beside him and stood
looking at him.

"Why didn't you tell them the
truth?" Rodney Maxwell asked.

The question angered Conn. It
was what he had been asking him-
self.

"Why didn't I just grab a couple
of pistols off the table and shoot
the lot of them?" he retorted. "It
would have killed them quicker
and wouldn't have hurt as much."

His father took the cigar from
his mouth and inspected the tip
of it. "The truth must be pretty

140

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

bad then. There is no Brain. It
that it, son?"

"There never was one. I'm not
saying that only because I know
it would be impossible to build
such a computer. I'm telling you
what the one man in the Galaxy
who ought to know told me— the
man who commanded the Third
Force during the War."

"Foxx Travis! I didn't know he
was still alive. You actually talked
to him?"

"Yes. He's on Luna, keeping
himself alive at low gravity. It
took me a couple of years, and I
was afraid he'd die before I got
to him, but I finally managed to
see him."

"What did he tell you?"

"That no such thing as the
Brain ever existed." They started
walking again, more slowly, toward
the far edge of the terrace, with
the sky red and orange in front
of them. "The story was all
through the Third Force, but it
was just one of those wild tales
that get started, nobody knows
how, among troops. The High

Command never denied or even
discouraged it. It helped morale,
and letting it leak to the enemy
was good psychological warfare."
"Klem Zareff says that every-
body in the Alliance army heard
of the Brain," his father said.
"That was why he came here in
the first place." He puffed thought-
fully on his cigar. "You said a

computer like the Brain would be
an impossibility. Why? Wouldn't
it be just another computer, only
a lot bigger and a lot smarter?"

?CT\AD, computermen don't like

-*-^ to hear computers called
smart," Conn said. "They aren't.
The people who build them are
smart; a computer only knows
what's fed to it. They can hold
more information in their banks
than a man can in his memory,
they can combine it faster, they
don't get tired or absent-minded.
But they can't imagine, they can't
create, and they can't do anything
a human brain can't."

"You know, I'd wondered about
just that," said his father. "And
none of the histories of the War
even as much as mentioned the
Brain. And I couldn't see why,
after the War, they didn't build
dozens of them to handle all these
Galactic political and economic
problems that nobody seems able
to solve. A thing like the Brain
wouldn't only be useful for war;
the people here aren't trying to
find it for war purposes."

"You didn't mention any of
these doubts to the others, did
you?"

"They were just doubts. You

knew for sure, and you couldn't
tell them."

iCTI

I'd come home intending to—
tell them there was no Brain, tell
them to stop wasting their time

GRAVEYARD OF DREAMS

141

for it and start trying to
figure out the answers themselves.
But I couldn't. They don't believe
in the Brain as a tool, to use; it's
a machine god that they can
bring all their troubles to. You
can't take a thing like that away
from people without giving them
something better."

."I noticed you suggested build-
ing a spaceship and agreed with
the professor about building a
computer. What was your idea?
To take their minds off hunting
for the Brain and keep them
busy?"

Conn shook his head. "I'm
serious about the ship— ships. You

■

and Colonel Zareff gave me that
idea."

IS father objected. "We can't
base the whole economy of
a planet on brandy. Only about
ten per cent of the arable land
Poictesme will grow wine-melons.

■

And if we start exporting Federa-
tion salvage the way you talk of,
we'll be selling pieces instead of
job lots. We'll net more, but—"
"That's just to get us started.
The ships will be used, after that,
to get to Tubal-Cain and Hia-
watha and the planets of the Beta
and Gamma Systems. What I
want to see is the mines and fac-

i

tories reopened, people employed,
wealth being produced."

"And where'll we sell what we
produce? Remember, the mines
closed down because there was no

His father looked at him in more market."

surprise. "I never said a word in
there, and Klem didn't even once
mention—"

"Not in Kurt's office; before
we went up from the docks. There
was Klem, moaning about a good
year for melons as though it were
a plague, and you selling arms and
ammunition by the ton. Why, on

— ■

Terra or Baldur or Uller, a glass
of our brandy brings more than
these freighter-captains give us
for a cask, and what do you think
a colonist on Agramma, or
or Hachiman, who has to fight for
his life against savages and wild
animals, would pay for one of
those rifles and a thousand rounds
of ammunition?"

"No more interstellar market,
that's true. But there are a hun-
dred and fifty million people on
Poictesme. That's a big enough
market and a big enough labor
force to exploit the wealth of the

Gartner Trisystem. We can have
prosperity for everybody on our
own resources. Just what do ,we
need that we have to get from
outside now?"

His father stopped again and
sat down on the edge of a fountain

i

— the same one, possibly, from
which Conn had seen dust blowing
as the airship had been coming
in.

"Conn, that's a dangerous idea.
That was what brought on the

142

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

System States War. The Alliance
planets took themselves outside
the Federation economic orbit and
t lie Federation crushed them."

Conn swore impatiently.
"You've been listening to old Klem
ZarefT ranting about the Lost
( lause and the greedy Terran rob-

ber barons holding the Galaxy in
economic serfdom while they piled
up profits. The Federation didn't
fight that war for profits; there
weren't any profits to fight for.
They fought it because if the Sys-
tem States had won, half of them
would be at war among themselves
now. Make no mistake about it,
politically I'm all for the Federa-
tion. But economically, I want to
si •• ■ our people exploiting their own
i (sources for themselves, instead of
iK-ving about lost interstellar
trade, and bewailing bumper crops,
and searching for a mythical robot

god."

"You think, if you can get some-
thing like that started, that they'll
foii't about the Brain?" his father
asked skeptically.

"That crowd up in Kurt Faw-
/i's office? Niflheim, no! They'll
go on hunting for the Brain as

of the Trisystem, opening mines
and factories, producing wealth—
for them to get caught in that
empty old dream."

He looked down at the dusty
fountain on which his father sat.
"That ghost-dream haunts this
graveyard. I want to give them
living dreams that they can make
come true."

ONN'S father sat in silence

for a while, his cigar smoke
red in the sunset. "If you can do
all that, Conn . . . You know, I
believe you can. I'm with you, as
far as I can help, and we'll have a
talk with Charley. He's a good
boy, Conn, and he has a lot of in-
fluence among the other young-
sters." He looked at his watch.
"We'd better be getting along. You
don't want to be late for your

own coming-home party."

Rodney Maxwell slid off the

edge of the fountain to his feet,
hitching at the gunbelt under his
coat. Have to dig out his own gun
and start wearing it, Conn thought.
A man simply didn't go around
in public without a gun in Litch-
field. It wasn't decent. And he'd

long as they live, and every day be spending a lot of time out in

they'll be expecting to find it to-
morrow. That'll keep them happy.
But they're all old men. The ones
I'm interested in are the boys of
Charley's age. I'm going to give
them too many real things to do
building ships, exploring the rest

the brush, where he'd really need
one.

First thing in the morning, he'd
unpack that trunk and go over
all those maps. There were half
a dozen spaceports and mainte-
nance shops and shipyards within

GRAVEYARD OF DREAMS

143

a half-day by airboat, none of
which had been looted. He'd look
them all over; that would take a
couple of weeks. Pick the best
shipyard and concentrate on it.
Kurt Fawzi'd be the man to re-
cruit labor. Professor Kellton was
a scholar, not a scientist. He didn't
know beans about hyperdrive en-
gines, but he knew how to do
library research.

They came to the edge of High
Garden Terrace at the escalator,
long motionless, its moving parts
rusted fast, that led down to the
Mall, and at the bottom of it was
Senta's, the tables under the open
sky.

A crowd was already gathering.
There was Tom Brangwyn, and
there was Kurt Fawzi and his wife,

and Lynne. And there was Senta
herself, fat and dumpy, in one of
her preposterous red-and-purple
dresses, bustling about, bubbling
happily one moment and scream-

*

ing invective at some laggard
waiter the next

The dinner, Conn knew, would
be the best he had eaten in five
years, and afterward they would
sit in the dim glow of Beta Gart-
ner, sipping coffee and liqueurs,
smoking and talking and visiting
back and forth from one table to
another, as they always did in the
evenings at Senta's. Another bit
from Eirrarsson's

poem came

back to him:

We sit

the

the

m tne twilight,
shadows among,
And we talk of the happy days
when we were brave and
young.

That was for the old ones, for
Colonel Zareff and Judge Ledue
and Dolf Kellton, maybe even for
Tom Brangwyn and Franz Vel-

trin and for his father. But his

brother Charley and the boys of

his generation would have a future

to talk about. And so would he,

and Lynne Fawzi.

— H. BEAM PIPER

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